Belshazzar court; or, Village life in New York city

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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT
FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY

HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE

BELSHAZZAR COURT

BT THE SAME A UTHOR

THE PATIENT OBSERVER

THROUGH THE OUTLOOKING GLASS

POST IMPRESSIONS

BELSHAZZAR COURT

OR

VILLAGE LIFE IN
NEW YORK CITY

BY

SIMEON STRUNSKY

1^1

3s' Jl

1

NE"W YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1914

f -a

Copyright, 1914,

BT

HENEY HOLT AND COMPANY
PuilUhed October, 1914

Portions of this Tolame were copjrighted
■eparatelf as follows :

In Belthazzar Court, copyright, 1913, by
The Ailantic Monthly Company.

The Street, The Show, The Game, and
School, copyright, 1914, by The Atlantic
Monthly Company.

Night Life, copyright, 1914, by Harper and
Brothers.

c-

THE QUINN * kODEH CO. MtEtS

KAHWAT, N. J.

CONTENTS

CnAPTES

PACI

I. In Belshazzae Couet 3

II. The Street 28

III. The Show 50

IV. The Game 73

V. Night Life 98

VI. Laueelmere in Peace and War . 117

VII. School 146

VIII. Harold and the Universe . . . 169

BELSHAZZAR COURT

IN BELSHAZZAR COURT

Otjb apartment house has all-night elevator
service. We have grown accustomed to being
awakened in the middle of the night by the sound
of violent hammering on the iron door of the ele-
vator shaft, the object of which is to attract the
attention of the operator, who is in the habit of
running up his car to the top floor and going to
sleep in the hall, being roused only with the great-
est difficulty. Tenants have complained of the
inconvenience ; especially when one comes home
late from an after-theater supper at a Broadway
hotel. In deference to such complaints our ele-
vator boys are constantly being discharged, but
the tradition of going to sleep on the top floor
seems to be continuous.

One of the reasons for this, I imagine, is that
our landlord underpays his help and is conse-
quently in no position to enforce discipline. How-
ever, I speak almost entirely on information and
belief, my personal experience with the all-night

3

4 BELSHAZZAR COURT

elevator having been confined to a single instance.
That was when we came back from our vacation
last summer at an early hour in the morning and
rang the bell without eliciting any response. In-
asmuch as we live only two flights up, we walked
up the stairs, I carrying a suit-case, a hand-bag
and the baby, and Emmeline carrying another
suit-case and leading by the hand our boy Harold,
who was fast asleep.

During the day our elevator is frequently
out of order. The trouble, I believe, is with the
brake, which every little while fails to catch, so
that the car slides down a floor or two and sticks.
It is quite probable that if our elevator boys re-
mained long enough to become acquainted with
the peculiar characteristics of the machinery in
Belshazzar Court such stoppages would come less
often. But no serious accidents have ever oc-
curred, to my knowledge, and personally, as I
have said, I suffer little inconvenience, since it is
no trouble at all to walk up two flights of stairs.

But it is different with Emmeline, who worries
over the children. She will not allow the baby to
be taken into the car. Instead, she makes the
nurse ride up or down with the go-cart, and
has her fetch the baby by the stairs. Em-
meline complains that in cold weather this

IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 5

necessitates her own going downstairs to tuck the
child into her cart, a duty which cannot possibly
be delegated. It also exposes the baby to
draughts while she is being taken out of the cart
in the hall, preparatory to being carried upstairs.
But Emmeline would rather take that chance than
have the elevator drop with baby, as happened
twice during the first week after we moved in. I
have sometimes argued with her on the subject,
maintaining that there cannot be any real danger
when the safety of the elevator is guaranteed by
no less than three casualty companies; but Em-
meline says that is a detached point of view which
she cannot share. Our boy Harold is under strict
injunctions to walk. He finds it a deprivation,
after having twice tasted the joy of being
marooned between floors, whence he was rescued
by means of a ladder.

It is on account of the large bedrooms that we
selected this particular apartment house and cling
to it in spite of certain obvious disadvantages.
That is, there is really one bedroom only which
can be called very large, but it has a fair amount
of sunlight and it faces on an open court. Harold
has the music-room, which landlords formerly
used to call the back parlor. It faces on the
avenue and makes an excellent sleeping-room and

6 BELSHAZZAR COURT

play-room for the boy. Such rooms are ahnost
impossible to find in a tolerable neighborhood for
the really moderate rent we pay. That is, my rent
is just a little more than I can afford; neverthe-
less you would think it reasonable if you saw what
a fine appearance our apartment house makes. It
has a fa9ade in Flemish brick, with bay windows
belted by handsome railings of wrought iron upon
narrow stone balconies. It also has a mansard
cornice painted a dull green, which is visible sev-
eral blocks away over the roofs of the old-fash-
ioned flats by which our house is surrounded.

Our friends, when they come to see us for the
first time, are impressed with Belshazzar Court.
You pass through heavy grilled doors into a
marble-lined vestibule which is separated by a
second pair of massive doors from the spacious
main hall. This hall is gay with an astonishingly
large number of handsome electroliers in imita-
tion cut glass. There is also a magnificent marble
fireplace in which the effect of a wood fire is
simulated by electric bulbs under a sheet of red-
colored isinglass. The heat is furnished by a
steam radiator close by. The floor has two large
Oriental rugs of domestic manufacture. There is
a big leather couch in front of the fireplace.
Everywhere are large, comfortable, arm-chairs in

IN BELSHAZZAB, COURT 7

which I have often thought it would be pleasant
to lounge and smoke, but I have never had the
time. On a mahogany table, in the center, the
day's mail is displayed. I have sometimes glanced
over the letters in idle curiosity and found that
they consist largely of circulars from clothing
firms and dyeing establishments. The chandeliers
usually have a number of the crystal prisms
broken or missing. The rugs are fairly worn, but
doubtless the casual visitor does not notice that.
The general eflFect of our main hall is, as I have
said, imposing. Sunday afternoons there are
several motor-cars lined up in front of the house.
The number of young children in our apart-
ment house is not large, a dozen or fifteen, per-
haps. The house has six stories and there are
nine apartments to the floor, so you can figure out
for yourself the rate of increase for the popula-
tion of Belshazzar Court. My own contribution
to the infant statistics of our apartment house
is apparently between one-sixth and one-eighth of
the total number. Moreover, if you calculate not
by mere number but by the amount of vital energy
liberated, my own share is still larger. For there
is no denying the justice of the hall boys' com-
plaint that our Harold creates more disturbance
in the house than any other three children. The

8 BELSHAZZAR COURT

missing prisms in the hall chandeliers are in con-
siderable degree to be attributed to Harold. Not
that he has a predilection for electroliers. He is
just as hard on shoes and stockings. The former
he destroys in a peculiar manner. As he walks
upstairs, he carefully adjusts the upper of his
shoe, just over the arch, to the edge of each step,
and scrapes toward the toe slowly but firmly.
When in good form he can shave the toes from a
new pair of shoes in a single afternoon, and I
have known him to reduce his footgear, within a
week, to a semblance of degraded destitution that
is the despair and mortification of his mother.

However, it must not be supposed that Harold
is unpopular with the working staff of Belshazzar
Court. The only apparent exception is the house
superintendent, who is held responsible for all
damage accruing to halls and stairways. His
point of view is therefore quite comprehensible.
But even the bitter protests of the house superin-
tendent are not, I imagine, a true index to his
permanent state of feeling with regard to Harold.
At least I know that after the superintendent has
called up Emmeline on the telephone to complain
of Harold's fondness for tracing patterns on the
mahogany hall table with a wire nail, the boy has
been found in the cellar watching the stoking of

IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 9

the furnace with bated breath, a privilege con-
ferred on but few. The superintendent has also
given Harold the run of a great pile of cinders
and ashes which occasionally accumulates near
the furnace doors. From such excursions the
boy returns with the knees of his stockings en-
tirely gone, and only the blue of his eyes discern-
ible through a layer of coal dust which lends him
an aspect of extraordinary ferocity.

And yet I believe it is Harold's clamorous
career through life that is the secret of his popu-
larity with the people in our house. When he
walks down the stairs it sounds like a catastrophe.
He engages in furious wrestling bouts with the
hall boys, whose life he threatens to take in the
most fiendishly cruel manner. His ability to
" lick " the elevator boy and the telephone
operator single-handed is an open secret to any-
one who has ever met Harold, But as I have said,
there are very few children in the house, and I
imagine that the sound of him engaging in mortal
combat with the elevator boy and the clatter of
his progress down the stairs echo rather grate-
fully at times through the long, somber hall-
ways,

I am an eyewitness of Harold's popularity on
Sunday mornings when Emmeline and I, with both

10 BELSHAZZAR COURT

the children, ride down in the elevator for our
weekly stroU along the Boulevard. Mj bodily
presence on Sunday so far removes my wife's ap-
prehensions with regard to the elevator that she
will consent to take the baby down in the car. On
such occasions I have observed that our neighbors
invariably smile at Harold. Sometimes they will
ask him how soon and in just what way he in-
tends to destroy the new hall boy, or they will
reach out a hand and pluck at his ear. The
women in the car content themselves with smiling
at him.

Harold's friends, who thus salute him on Sun-
day morning, usually carry or lead a small dog
or two which they are taking out for the daily
exercise. There are a large number of small dogs
in our apartment house. I don't pretend to know
the different breeds, but they are nearly all of
them winsome little beasts, with long, silky pelts,
retrousse noses, and eyes that blink fiercely at you.
Their masters are as a rule big, thick-set men,
well advanced toward middle age, faultlessly
dressed, and shaven to the quick. Or else the
small dogs repose in the arms of tall, heavy women,
who go mercilessly corseted and pay full tribute
to modem requirements in facial decoration.
They seem to lay great store by their pets, but

IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 11

they also find a kind "glance for Harold. Some-
times I imagine it is a different glance which they
turn from their little dogs to Harold — a softer
look, with the suggestion of wonder in it. From
Harold and the baby they usually glance at Em-
meline. I pass virtually unnoticed.

I have mentioned the baby. When she is with
us, Harold does not monopolize our neighbors'
attention. It would be odd if it were otherwise.
I am not so partisan as Emmeline in this matter,
but I am inclined to think she is right when she
says that our baby's eyes, of a liquid grayish-blue,
staring in fascination out of the soft, pink swell
of her cheeks, cannot help going straight to the
heart of every normally constituted bystander.
The women with small dogs in their arms smile at
Harold, but they will bend down to the baby and
hold out a finger to her and ask her name. Under
such circumstances the behavior of Emmeline is
rather difficult to explain. She is proud and
resentful at the same time. Her moral judg-
ments are apt to be swift and sharp, and when
we are alone she has often characterized these
neighbors of ours — the women, I mean — in pretty
definite terms. Her opinion of women whose in-
terests are satisfied by a husband and a toy dog
would please Mr. Roosevelt, I imagine. Yet she

12 BELSHAZZAR COURT

never fails to tell me of the extraordinary charm
our baby exerts on these very people whose out-
look upon life and ssthetic standards she
thoroughly despises.

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, dur-
ing our encounters in the elevator with our close-
shaven, frock-coated neighbors and their fashion-
ably dressed wives, I have looked at Emmeline's
clothes and made comparisons not to her discredit
but to my own. I should like Emmeline to cut as
fine a figure as her neighbors, occasionally. Our
neighbors' wives on a Sunday are dazzling in
velvets and furs and plumes, whereas Emmeline
has a natural disinclination for ostrich feathers
even if we could afford to go in for such things.
Her furs are not bad, but they are not new. They
have worn well during the four years she has had
them; nevertheless they are not new.

I am not hinting at shabbiness. That is the
last thing you would think of if you saw Enuneline.
An exquisite cleanhness of figure, a fine animation
in the eyes and the cut of her lips, an electric
youthfulness of gesture — I know that clothes are
vanity, but sometimes, on Sundays, I am seized
with an extraordinary desire for velvets and
feathers and furs. I feel that there must be a
certain, spiritual tonic in the knowledge of being

IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 13

splendidly overdressed. It is a plunge into out-
lawry which has its temptations to quiet people
like myself who would never dare to put on a red
tie. I sometimes wonder if the ancient Greeks,
with all their inborn taste for simplicity in line
and color, did not occasionally go in for a sar-
torial spree. I really do not regret the fact that
I cannot afford to give Emmeline a sealskin coat
and a hat with aigrettes. Ninety-nine times out
of a hundred I should feel uneasy to see her thus
arrayed. But occasionally, yes, occasionally, I
should like it.

Frequently I catch myself wondering how the
others can afford it. I take it that even when
you make due allowance for the New York tem-
perament it is fairly safe to assume that people
living in the same apartment house occupy the
same economic level. There are exceptions, of
course. Tucked away in some rear-court apart-
ment you will find people whose bank accounts
would amaze their neighbors. But these are pre-
cisely the ones who make the least display. They
are maiden ladies of native American descent and
the last of their line; or the widows of Tammany
contractors and office-holders who divide their
time between works of piety and a cat ; or prolific
German families of the second generation living

1* BELSHAZZAR COURT

after the sober traditions of the race. Still, I feel
sure that the majority of our neighbors in Bel-
shazzar Court are in the same income class with
myself. How, then, can they afford it all — velvets,
furs, the Sunday afternoon motor-car in front of
the door? I put aside the obvious explanation,
that there are no children. That would make
a very considerable difference, but still — ^motor-
cars, bridge three times a week for very consider-
able stakes, tables reserved at Shanley's for Elec-
tion night and New Year's Eve —

" They have to afford it," says Emmeline, with
that incisive justice of hers in which I should
sometimes like to see a deeper tincture of mercy.
" When you come to think of it, a little pink-
nosed dog cannot fill up a woman's life. There
must be other interests."

" In other words," I said, " they can't afford it.
Do these people pay their biUs ? "

We used to call this a rhetorical question at
college. My information on the subject is prob-
ably as good as Emmeline's. Five minutes of
pleasant gossip with one's newsdealer is illuminat-
ing. Not that I am given to hanging over shop-
counters, or that my newsdealer would be reckless
enough to mention names. But since we are by
way of being in the same line of business, I writing

IN BELSHAZZAB, COURT 15

for the newspapers while he sells them, — and in-
cidentally makes the better income of the two, —
we do pass the time of day whenever I drop in
for cigars or stationery. On such occasions,
without quoting names, he will state it as a regret-
table economic puzzle that so many people who
ride in motor-cars should find it hard to pay their
newspaper bills. There was one account, running
up to something over eight dollars, he told me,
that he was finally compelled to write down to
profit and loss. The figures are instructive.
Eleven cents a week — for it is an odd fact that
people who ride in motor-cars read only the penny
papers — makes forty-four cents a month. Throw
in an occasional ten-cent magazine and you have
a total expenditure of say seventy or eighty cents
a month. An unpaid newspaper bill of eight dol-
lars would therefore argue a condition of acute
financial embarrassment extending over a period
of nearly a year.

My newsdealer's explanation was that garage
bills must be paid with fair promptness and din-
ners at Shanley's must be paid for in cash, seeing
that the demand is always greater than the sup-
ply. Whereas the competition among newsdealers
is so sharp, and literature is on the whole a luxury
so easily dispensed with, that the news vendor

16 BELSHAZZAR COURT

must be content to wait for his bill or lose his
customer. And he went on to say that there is
serious talk among men in his line of business
of organizing a newsdealers' benevolent and pro-
tective association for the enforcement of collec-
tions from customers living in elevator apart-
ments.

" And then again," says Emmeline, " why
shouldn't they be able to afford it? They don't
eat."

She goes on to show that inevitably a house
with no children in it is a house with very little
good food in it. Emmeline has made a study of
eugenics, and she has come to the conclusion that
the purest milk and a lot of it, the juiciest steaks,
and the freshest vegetables constitute the best
preventive of a neurotic citizenship in the future.
It is a principle which she lives up to so resolutely
that our food biUs would strike many people as
staggering. Now appetite, Emmeline argues, is
very susceptible to suggestion. People learn to
eat by watching their young. It's like caviare.
But where there are no children life may easily
be sustained on soda crackers and a glass of millk.

And it is something more than that. (I am
still paraphrasing Emmeline's views.) A dining-
room table with children's eager, hungry faces

IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 17

around it ceases to be a mere dining-room table
and becomes an altar. Dinner is not a mere
replenishing of the physiological furnaces ; it
partakes of the nature of a sacrament, with the
mother as the high priestess, and the father, —
well, let us call him the tithe-gatherer. Eating in
common is a form of primitive nature-worship
which the purest religions have taken over and
sanctified. To break bread together — well, all
this is quite obvious. But now try to think of a
sacrament as being administered with a can-
opener and a chafing-dish.

" That is what they live on," says Emmeline,
" things that come out of tins and paper boxes.
At the end of a year it means a fur coat." Which
isn't really very convincing. A single after-
theater supper on Broadway will easily swallow
up a week's frying-pan economies. But as an
index of the attitude of those women who cook
for their children to those women who have no
children to cook for, Emmeline's opinion has its
value. I admit that, being a woman, she is
prejudiced, my own prejudices being to a very
great extent the reflection of hers.

Emmeline has a hatred for gossip that is quite
extraordinary in one who is so closely confined to
her home by household duties. Hence you will

18 BELSHAZZAR COURT

wonder where she obtains her information, some-
times so startlingly intimate, regarding our neigh-
bors' habits. Well, in the first place, Belshazzar
Court is very much like those Russian prisons you
read about, which hum and echo with news flashing
along mysterious channels. The prison walls re-
sound to ghostly taps in the still of the night.
The water-pipes beat out their message. A
handkerchief is waved at a window. A convict's
shackled feet, dragging along the corridor, send
out the Morse code of the cell. So it requires no
special gift of imagination to sit in one's apart-
ment and reconstruct the main outlines of the life
about you. The mechanical piano downstairs has
its say. There is a scamper of young feet in the
hallway above. A voice of exasperation rasps its
way down the dimib-waiter. A sewing machine
w^hirs its short half hour and is silent. Little
yelping volleys announce meal-time for the silken-
haired Pekinese. As night comes on, the lights
begin to flash up, revealing momentary silhouettes,
groups, bits of stiU life. The alarm clock in the
morning and the heavy, thoughtful tread at mid-
night bespeak different habits and occupations.
It is a world built up out of sounds.

There are the servants. They are the telegraph
wires of apartment-house life. Like a good many

IN BELSHAZZAR COUET 19

telegraph wires in the great world outside, they
are sadly overburdened with trivialities. Yet a
healthy cook or nursemaid will pick up during a
ten minutes' excursion to the roof an amazing
mass of miscellaneous information. This infor-
mation she insists upon imparting to you. At
first Emmeline would refuse to listen, protesting
that she did not care to be burdened with other
people's affairs. But we soon learned that the one
form of class-distinction which domestic help will
not tolerate is a refusal to meet them on the
common level of gossip. What makes the prob-
lem all the more difficult is that as a rule the best
servants have the keenest appetite for petty
scandal. Presumably a robust interest in one's
own duties goes hand in hand with a healthy inter-
est in the way other people are living up to their
duty. Elizabeth, the only cook we have ever
had who will not create a scene when somebody
drops in unexpectedly for dinner, simply oozes in-
formation. When I think of the secrets into
which Elizabeth has initiated us with regard to
our neighbors whom we have never met, I feel
an embarrassment which is only relieved by the
thought that these neighbors must be quite as
well informed about ourselves.

Perhaps I should know more of our neighbors

20 BELSHAZZAR COURT

if the electric lights in our stately hallways did
not burn so dimly. I have mentioned the hand-
some glass chandeliers in our main hall and ves-
tibule. Unfortunately they give forth a faint,
sepulchral light. Our elevator car, a massive
cage of iron and copper, is quite dark. It may
be that our landlord has artistic leanings and is
trying to impart a subdued, studio atmosphere
to his halls ; very dim illumination being, I under-
stand, the proper thing in advanced circles. In-
cidentally there must be a saving in electricity
bills. At any rate, if you will take into considera-
tion the fact that I have a habit of staring at
people, even in broad daylight, without recogniz-
ing them, and if you will add to that the fact that
a day's fussing over proofs and exchanges in the
office is followed by an hour in the Subway over
the evening papers, it is quite plain why I have
difficulty in remembering the faces of neighbors
whom I occasionally run across.

Most of the neighbors are very much the same
way. An hour in the dead atmosphere of the Sub-
way wilts the social virtues out of a man. We
manage to make our way listlessly into the upper
air. We trudge wearily through the handsome
iron doors of our apartment house. We take our
places in opposite comers of the elevator car and

IN BELSHAZZAE COURT 21

stare up at the roof of the cage or count the floors
as we pass. Three or four of us leave at the
same floor and go our several ways, I to niunber
43 on the right, one man to number 42 straight
ahead, one to the left, and so forth. As I have
said, there are nine apartments to the floor.

Emmeline insists that I should not read in the
Subway. She says I ought to lean back and close
my eyes and rest. But she forgets that the man
you lean back upon is sure to protest. Lateral
pressure enforces an attitude of extreme rigidity
during the rush hour, and to stand up straight
with one's eyes closed tight is obviously ridiculous.
Even when I find a seat, I do not like to close my
eyes. It gives people the impression that I am
pretending to be asleep in order to avoid giving
up my seat to a woman, and on that subject I
have the courage of my convictions. An hour in
the Subway can be made endurable only by some
such narcotic as the evening papers aflFord; and
when you have read through three or four papers,
your eyes naturally show the strain.

Of course, if we stay long enough in Belshazzar
Court, we shall make acquaintances. Accident
will bring that about. For instance, there are a
number of men in my line of work and the allied
professions who meet every now and then in a

22 BELSHAZZAR COURT

little German cafe on the East side in the
'Eighties. It is not a club, since there are neither
members nor by-laws nor initiation fees, nor,
worst of all abominations, a set subject for papers
and discussion. People simply drift in and out.
We keep late hours, and it is a well-known fact
that in the early hours of the morning friendships
are rather easily formed. That was the way I
met Brewster.

Brewster (I don't know his first name) is a tall,
thin, sallow-faced man of thirty-five who looks
the Middle West he comes from. I had seen him
at two of our meetings before we fell into talk.
He spoke sparingly, not because he was shy, but
because as a rule he had trouble in finding the
right phrase. It was not until we were walking
across town toward the Subway one night that I
found out that Brewster is associate professor
of mathematics at my old university. But he
has ideas outside of Euclid. He is a Radical, he
detests New York, and he is looking forward to
the time when he can get away. But I imagine
that he is not looking forward very eagerly. Your
Radical loves the city while he curses it. At any
rate, the Subway trains make speed at night and
I was at my station before I knew it. Had he
passed his own? No, it appeared that this was

IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 25

his station, too. That was pleasant, I said. Liv-
ing in the same neighborhood I hoped we would
see more of each other in the future. He said it
would be pleasant indeed; his own address was
Belshazzar Court. He had been there more than
two years now. He lived on the third floor, in 47.

" That would be directly across the court from
43.?"

He thought it was.

That was two weeks ago. We have not yet
found the time to drop in on Brewster. But
sometimes I catch a glimpse of him through the
window-curtains of his dining-room. Of course
I had seen his figure pass across the window be-
fore, but naturally had never looked long enough
to fix his face in my memory. He has his two
children and his unmarried sister in the apart-
ment with him. The mother of the children is
dead. The elder is a boy of seven, and I think
he must be the pleasant-faced lad who on several
occasions has rung our bell and complained that
our Harold has robbed him of various bits of
personal property — a toy pistol, a clay pipe, and
several college emblems of the kind that come in
cigarette boxes.

That is all I know of Brewster directly. Em-
meline knows a little more. She has it from our

24 BELSHAZZAR COURT

cook, who has it from Brewster's cook. He goes
out very rarely. In the morning he escorts the
little boy to a private school half a mile away.
This he does on his way to the university. He
comes home a little earlier than I do, usually with
a grip full of books. Our cook says that Brewster
is invariably present when his sister gives the little
girl her bath before putting her to bed ; the child
is only two years old. The boy has his supper
with his father and aunt, and it is Brewster him-
self who superintends his going to bed. This
process is extremely involved and is marked by a
great deal of rough-and-tumble hilarity. Late at
night, as I sit reading or writing, I catch a glimpse
of him over his work at the big dining-room table,
correcting examination papers, I suppose, though
I believe he does some actuarial work for an insur-
ance company. He will get up occasionally for a
turn or two about the room, or to fill his pipe, or
to fetch from the kitchen a cup of tea which he
drinks cold. I see him at work long after mid-
night.

Have I gone into all this detail concerning
Brewster merely because he happens to live in
47, which is just across the court from 43, or be-
cause our habits and our interests really do touch
at so many points? If Brewster were writing

IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 25

down his impressions of Belshazzar Court at mid-
night, with myself as the central figure, his story
would be very much like mine. A glimpse into
the windows of our dining-room would show me,
too, in a clutter of papers, rustling through my
exchange clippings, dipping into a volume of
" Pickwick " for a moment's rest, striking in-
numerable matches to keep a reluctant pipe
a-going, and drinking cold tea, — too much cold
tea, I am afraid.

Yes, Brewster and I have something in com^
mon. But then I wonder, if I were living one
floor above, in 53, and chance had made me ac-
quainted with Smith who lives across the court in
67, would Smith and I discover that there are
human ties between us other than our dependence
on the same central heating plant? For one
thing, I know that the Smiths have a baby which
frequently cries at night in unison with our own.
Sometimes the Smith baby wakes up ours. Some-
times the initiative comes from our own side.

Because I drink so much cold tea before going
to bed, I find it diflicult to fall asleep. I lie
awake and think of Belshazzar Court with a fond-
ness that I cannot muster at any other time.
The house offers me an extraordinary sense of
security ; not for myself, but for those who belong

26 BELSHAZZAR COURT

to me. It is a comfort to have one's wife and
children snugly tucked away in one's own particu-
lar cluster of cells at the end of one's own ob-
scure little passageway, where an enemy would
need Ariadne's guiding thread to find them. The
cave man must have felt some such satisfaction
when he had stored his young and their mother
into some peculiarly inacessible rock cleft.

I suppose the dark is a favorable time for the
recurrence of such primordial feelings. In the
dark the need for human fellowship wells up to
the surface. Athwart the partitions of lath and
mortar, we of Belshazzar Court experience the
warm, protective sensation which comes from
huddling together against the invisible menaces
of the night.

Decidedly, I must give up drinking so much cold
tea. My eyes to-morrow will show the strain.
But it is wonderful, too, this lying awake and
feeling that you can almost catch the heart-throb
of hundreds, above you, below you, on both sides.
My neighbors undergo a magic transformation.
Deprived of individuality, — ^viewed, so to speak,
under their eternal aspect, — they grow lovable.
Belshazzar's Court is transformed. In the day
it is a barracks. At night it becomes a waUed
refuge, a tabernacle almost. The pulse of life

IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 27

beats through its halls with just enough momen-
tum to make a solemn music which gradually over-
comes the effects of the cold tea. Intermittent
noises twist themselves into vague fugues and
arabesques. Somewhere on the floor above, heavy
footsteps go back and forth in leisurely prepara-
tion for bed. Somewhere across the court, people
have returned from the theater. Evidently they
are still under the exhilaration of the lights and
the crowd. They pass judgment on the play and
their voices are thoughtlessly fresh and animated,
considering how late it is; but somehow you are
not disturbed. With utter lack of interest you
hear a child's wail break out — it is the Smith
baby — and you hear the mother's " hush, hush,"
falling into a somnolent, crooning chant. Out-
side, a motor-car starts into life with a grinding
and a whir and a sputter, and you set yourself to
follow its receding hum, which becomes a drone
and then a murmur and then silence, but you are
not sure whether it is yet silence. As you are
still wondering there comes the end of things,
except that now and then you stir to the clamor
of the elevator bell, ringing indignantly for the
boy who has run the car up to the top floor and
gone to sleep in the hall.

n

THE STREET

It is two short blocks from my office near Park
Row to the Subway station where I take the ex-
press for Belshazzar Court, Eight months in
the year it is my endeavor to traverse this dis-
stance as quickly as I can. This is done by cut-
ting diagonally across the street traffic. By vir-
tue of the law governing right-angled triangles I
thus save as much as fifty feet and one-fifth of a
minute of time. In the course of a year this sav-
ing amounts to sixty minutes, which may be
profitably spent over a two-reel presentation of
" The Moonshiner's Bride," supplemented by an
intimate picture of Lumbering in Saskatchewan.

But with the coming of warm weather my
habits change. It grows difficult to plunge into
the murk of the Subway, A foretaste of June
is in the air. The turnstile storm-doors in our of-
fice building, which have been put aside for brief
periods during the first deceptive approaches of
spring, only to come back triumphant from Elba,

28

THE STREET 29

have been definitely removed. The steel-workers
pace their girders twenty floors high almost in mid-
season form, and their pneumatic hammers scold
and chatter through the sultry hours. The soda
fountains are bright with new compounds whose
names ingeniously reflect the world's progress
from day to day in politics, science, and the arts.
From my window I can see the long black steam-
ships pushing down to the sea, and they raise
vague speculations in my mind about the cost of
living in the vicinity of Sorrento and Fontaine-
bleau. On such a day I am reminded of my
physician's orders, issued last December, to walk
a mile every afternoon on leaving my office. So I
stroll up Broadway with the intention of taking
my train farther uptown, at Fourteenth Street.

The doctor did not say stroll. He said a brisk
walk with head erect, chest thrown out, diaphragm
well contracted, and a general aspect of money
in the bank. But here enters human perversity.
The only place where I am in the mood to walk
after the prescribed military fashion is in the
open country. Just where by all accounts I ought
to be sauntering without heed to time, studying
the lovely texts which Nature has set down in
the modest type-forms selected from her inex-
haustible fonts, — in the minion of ripening berries^

so BELSHAZZAR COURT

in the nonpareil of crawling insect life, the agate
of tendril and filament, and the 12-point diamond
of the dust, — ^there I stride along with my own
thoughts and see little.

And in the city, where I should swing along
briskly, I lounge. What is there on Broadway
to linger over? On Broadway, Nature has used
her biggest, fattest type-forms. Tall, flat, build-
ing fronts, brazen with many windows and ribbed
with commercial gilt lettering six feet high;
shrieking proclamations of auction sales written
in letters of fire on vast canvasses ; railway posters
in scarlet and blue and green; rotatory barber-
poles striving at the national colors and producing
vertigo ; banners, escutcheons, crests, in all the
primary colors — surely none of these things needs
poring over. And I know them with my eyes
closed. I know the windows where lithe youths in
gymnasium dress demonstrate the virtue of home
exercises; the windows where other young men do
nothing but put on and take ofiF patent reversible
near-linen collars ; where young women deftly roll
cigarettes; where other young women whittle at
sticks with miraculously stropped razors. I know
these things by heart, yet I linger over them in
flagrantly unhygienic attitudes, my shoulders bent
forward and my chest and diaphragm in a posi-

THE STREET SI

tion precisely the reverse of that prescribed by
the doctor.

Perhaps the thing that makes me linger before
these familiar sights is the odd circumstance that
in Broadway's shop-windows Nature is almost
never herself, but is either supernatural or arti-
ficial. Nature, for instance, never intended that
razors should cut wood and remain sharp; that
linen collars should keep on getting cleaner the
longer they are worn; that glass should not
break; that ink should not stain; that gauze
should not tear; that an object worth five dollars
should sell for $1.39; but all these things happen
in Broadway windows. Williams, whom I meet
now and then, who sometimes turns and walks up
with me to Fourteenth Street, pointed out to me
the other day how strange a thing it is that the
one street which has become a synonym for " real
life " to all good suburban Americans is not real
at all, but is crowded either with miracles or with
imitations.

The windows on Broadway glow with wax
fruits and with flowers of muslin and taffeta
drawn by bounteous Nature from her storehouses
in Parisian garret workshops. Broadway's ostrich
feathers have been plucked in East side tenements.
The huge cigars in the tobacconist's windows are

32 BELSHAZZAR COURT

of wood. The enormous bottles of champagne
in the saloons are of cardboard, and empty. Thfi
tall scaffoldings of proprietary medicine bottles
in the drug shops are of paper. "Why," said
Williams, " even the jewelry sold in the Japanese
auction stores is not genuine, and the auctioneers
are not Japanese."

This bustling mart of commerce, as the genera-
tion after the Civil War used to say, is only a
world of illusion. Artificial flowers, artificial
fruits, artificial limbs, tobacco, rubber, silks,
woolens, straws, gold, silver. The young men and
women who manipulate razors and elastic cords are
real, but not always. Williams and I once stood
for a long while and gazed at a young woman pos-
ing in a drug-shop window, and argued whether
she was alive. Ultimately she winked and Wil-
liams gloated over me. But how do I know her
wink was real? At any rate, the great mass of
humail life in the windows is artificial. The ladies
who smile out of charming morning costumes are
obviously of lining and plaster. Their smug
Herculean husbands in pajamas preserve their
equanimity in the severest winter weather only
because of their wire-and-plaster constitution.
The baby reposing in its beribboned crib is china
and excelsior. Illusion everywhere.

THE STREET 33

But the Broadway crowd is real. You only
have to buffet it for five minutes to feel, in eyes
and arms and shoulders, how real it is. When I
was a boy and was taken to the circus it was
always an amazing thing to me that there should
be so many people in the street moving in a direc-
tion away from the circus. Something of this
sensation still besets me whenever we go down in
the Subway from Belshazzar Court to hear Ca-
ruso. The presence of all the other people on
our train is simple enough. They are all on their
way to hear Caruso. But what of the crowds in
the trains that flash by in the opposite direction?
It is not a question of feeling sorry for them. I
try to understand and I faU. But on Broadway
on a late summer afternoon the obverse is true.
The natural thing is that the living tide as it
presses south shall beat me back, halt me, eddy
around me. I know that there are people moving
north with me, but I am not acutely aware of them.
This onrush of faces converges on me alone. It
is I against half the world.

And then suddenly out of the surge of faces
one leaps out at me. It is Williams, whose doctor
has told him that the surest way of fighting down
the lust for tobacco is to walk down from his office
to the ferry every afternoon. Williams and I

34 BELSHAZZAR COURT

salute each other after the fashion of Broadway,
which is to exchange greetings backward over the
shoulder. This is the first step in an elaborate
minuet. Because we have passed each other be-
fore recognition came, our hands fly out backward.
Now we whirl half around, so that I who have
been moving north face the west, while Williams,
who has been traveling south, now looks east. Our
clasped hands strain at each other as we stand
there poised for flight after the first greeting. A
quarter of a minute perhaps, and we have said
good-by.

But if the critical quarter of a minute passes,
there ensues a change of geographical position
which corresponds to a change of soul within us.
I suddenly say to myself that there are plenty of
trains to be had at Fourteenth Street. Williams
recalls that another boat will leave Battery Place
shortly after the one he is bound for. So the
tension of our outstretched arms relaxes. I, who
have been facing west, complete the half circle and
swing south. Williams veers due north, and we
two men stand face to face. The beat and clamor
of the crowd faU away from us like a well-trained
stage mob. We are in Broadway, but not of it.

" Well, what's the good word? " says Williams.

When two men meet on Broadway the spirit of

THESTEEET 35

optimism strikes fire. We begin by asking each
other what the good word is. We take it for
granted that neither of us has anything but a
chronicle of victory and courage to relate. What
other word but the good word is tolerable in the
lexicon of living, upstanding men.'' Failure is
only for the dead. Surrender is for the man with
yellow in his nature. So Williams and I pay our
acknowledgments to this best of possible worlds.
I give Williams the good word. I make no allusion
to the fact that I have spent a miserable night in
communion with neuralgia ; how can that possibly
concern him? Another manuscript came back this
morning from an editor who regretted that his is
the most unintelligent body of readers in the coun-
try. The third cook in three weeks left us last
night after making vigorous reflections on my
wife's good nature and my own appearance. Only
an hour ago, as I was watching the long, black
steamers bound for Sorrento and Fontainebleau,
the monotony of one's treadmill work, the flat un-
profitableness of scribbling endlessly on sheets of
paper, had become almost a nausea. But Wil-
liams will know nothing of this from me. Why
should he? He may have been sitting up all night
with a sick child. At this very moment the thought
of the little parched lips, the moan, the unseeing

36 BELSHAZZAR COURT

eyes, may be tearing at his entrails ; but he in turn
gives me the good word, and many others after
that, and we pass on.

But sometimes I doubt. This splendid optimism
of people on Broadway, in the Subway, and in the
shops and offices — ^is it really a sign of high spirit-
ual courage, or is it just lack of sensibility.'' Do
we find it easy to keep a stiff upper lip, to buck
up, to never say die, because we are brave men,
or simply because we lack the sensitiveness and
the imagination to react to pain.'' It may be even
worse than that. It may be part of our com-
mercial gift for window-dressing, for putting up
a good front.

Sometimes I feel that Williams has no right to
be walking down Broadway on business when there
is a stricken child at home. The world cannot
possibly need him at that moment as much as his
own flesh and blood does. It is not courage ; it is
brutish indifference. At such times I am tempted
to dismiss as mythical all this fine talk about feel-
ings that run deep beneath the surface, and
bruised hearts that ache under the smile. If a
man really suffers he will show it. If a man
cultivates the habit of not showing emotion he
will end by having none to show. How much of
Broadway's optimism is — But here I am para-

THE STREET 87

phrasing William James's Principles of Psy-
chology, whiqh the reader can just as well consult
for himself in the latest revised edition of 1907.
Also, I am exaggerating. Most likely Wil-
liams's children are all in perfect health, and my
envelope from the editor has brought a check in-
stead of a rejection slip. It is on such occasions
that Williams and I, after shaking hands the way
a locomotive takes on water on the run, wheel
around, halt, and proceed to buy something at the
rate of two for a quarter. If anyone is ever in-
clined to doubt the spirit of American fraternity,
it is only necessary to recall the number of com-
modities for men that sell two for twenty-five cents.
In theory, the two cigars which Williams and I
buy for twenty-five cents are worth fifteen cents
apiece. As a matter of fact, they are probably
ten-cent cigars. But the shopkeeper is welcome to
his extra nickel. It is a small price to pay for the
seal of comradeship that stamps his pair of cigars
selling for a single quarter. Two men who have
concluded a business deal in which each has com-
mendably tried to get the better of the other may
call for twenty-five cent perfectos or for half-
dollar Dreadnoughts. I understand there are
such. But friends sitting down together will al-
ways demand cigars that go for a round sum.

38 BELSHAZZAR COURT

two for a quarter or three for fifty (if the editor's
check is what it ought to be).

When people speak of the want of real comrade-
ship among women, I sometimes wonder if one of
the reasons may not be that the prices which
women are accustomed to pay are individualistic
instead of fraternal. The soda fountains and the
street cars do not dispense goods at the rate of
two items for a single coin. It is infinitely worse
in the department stores. Treating a friend to
something that costs $2.79 is inconceivable. But
I have really wandered from my point.

" Well, be good," says Williams, and rushes ofiF
to catch his boat.

The point I wish to make is that on Broadway
people pay tribute to the principle of goodness
that rules this world, both in the way they greet
and in the way they part. We salute by asking
each other what the good word is. When we say
good-by we enjoin each other to be good. The
humorous assumption is that gay devils like Wil-
liams and me need to be constantly warned against
straying off into the primrose paths that run out
of Broadway.

Simple, humorous, average American man!
You have left your suburban couch in time to walk
half a mile to the station and catch the 7.59 for

THE STREET 39

the city. You have read your morning paper ; dis-
cussed the weather, the Kaiser, and the prospects
for lettuce with your neighbor ; and made the oflBce
only a minute late. You have been fastened to
your desk from nine o'clock to five, with half an
hour for lunch, which you have eaten in a clamor-
ous, overheated restaurant while you watched your
hat and coat. At odd moments during the day
the thought of doctor's bills, rent bills, school bills,
has insisted on receiving attention. At the end
of the day, laden with parcels from the market,
from the hardware store, from the seedman, you
are bound for the ferry to catch the 5.43, when
you meet Smith, who, having passed the good word,
sends you on your way with the injunction to be
good — not to play roulette, not to open wine, not
to turkey-trot, not to joy-ride, not to haunt the
stage door. Be good, O simple, humorous, average
suburban American !

I take back that word suburban. The Sunday
Supplement has given it a meaning which is not
mine. I am speaking only of the suburban in
spirit, of a simplicity, a meekness which is of the
soul only. Outwardly there is nothing suburban
about the crowd on lower Broadway. The man
in the street is not at all the diminutive, apologetic
creature with side whiskers whom Mr. F. B. Opper

40 BELSHAZZAR COURT

brought forth and named Common People, who
begat the Strap-Hanger, who begat the Rent-
Payer and the Ultimate Consumer. The crowd on
lower Broadway is alert and well set up. Yes,
though one hates to do it, I must say " clean-cut."
The men on the sidewalk are young, limber, sharp-
faced, almost insolent young men. There are not
very many old men in the crowd, though I see any
number of gray-haired young men. Seldom do
you detect the traditional signs of age, the sag-
ging lines of the face, the relaxed abdominal con-
tour, the tamed spirit. The young, the young-old,
the old-young, but rarely quite the old.

I am speaking only of externals. Clean-cut,
eager faces are very frequently disappointing. A
very ordinary mind may be working behind that
clear sweep of brow and nose and chin. I have
known the shock of young men who look like kings
of Wall Street and speak like shoe clerks. They
are shoe clerks. But the appearance is there, that
athletic carriage which is helped out by our tri-
umphant, ready-made clothing. I suppose I ought
to detest the tailor's tricks which iron out all ages
and all stations into a uniformity of padded
shoulders and trim waist-lines and hips. I imagine
I ought to despise our habit of wearing elegant
shoddy where the European chooses honest,

THE STREET 41

clumsy woolens. But I am concerned only with
externals, and in outward appearances a Broad-
way crowd beats the world. ^Esthetically we sim-
ply are in a class by ourselves when compared
with the Englishman and the Teuton in their
skimpy, ill-cut garments. Let the British and
German ambassadors at Washington do their
worst. This is my firm belief and I will maintain
it against the world. The truth must out. Rtiat
caelum. Ich kann nicht anders. J'y suis, j'y reste.
Williams laughs at my lyrical outbursts. But
I am not yet through. I still have to speak of the
women in the crowd. What an infinitely finer
thing is a woman than a man of her class! To
see this for yourself you have only to walk up
Broadway until the southward-bearing stream
breaks off' and the tide begins to run from west to
east. You have passed out of the commercial dis-
trict into the region of factories. It is well on
toward dark, and the barracks that go by the
unlovely name of loft buildings, are pouring out
their battalions of needle-workers. The crowd
has become a mass. The nervous pace of lower
Broadway slackens to the steady, patient tramp
of a host. It is an army of women, with here and
there a flying detachment of the male.

On the faces of the men the day's toil has writ-

42 BELSHAZZAR COURT

ten its record even as on the woman, but in a
much coarser hand. Fatigue has beaten down the
soul of these men into brutish indifference. But in
the women it has drawn fine the flesh only to make
it more eloquent of the soul. Instead of listless-
ness, there is wistfulness. Instead of vacuity you
read mystery. Innate grace rises above the vul-
garity of the dress. Cheap, tawdry blouse and
imitation willow-plume walk shoulder to shoulder
with the shoddy coat of the male, copying Fifth
Avenue as fifty cents may attain to five dollars.
But the men's shoddy is merely a horror, whereas
woman transfigures and subtilizes the cheap mate-
rial. The spirit of grace which is the birthright
of her sex cannot be killed — ^not even by the pres-
ence of her best young man in Sunday clothes.
She is finer by the heritage of her sex, and America
has accentuated her title. This America which
drains her youthful vigor with oveiTvork, which
takes from her cheeks the color she has brought
from her Slavic or Italian peasant home, makes
restitution by remolding her in more delicate,
more alluring hnes, gives her the high privilege
of charm — and neurosis.

Williams and I pause at the Subway entrances
and watch the earth suck in the crowd. It lets
itself be swallowed up with meek good nature.

THESTREET, 43

Our amazing good nature! Political philosophers
have deplored the fact. They have urged us to
be quicker-tempered, more resentful of being
stepped upon, more inclined to write letters to the
editor. I agree that only in that way can we be
rid of political bosses, of brutal policemen, of
ticket-speculators, of taxicab extortioners, of
insolent waiters, of janitors, of indecent conges-
tion in travel, of unheated cars in the winter and
barred-up windows in summer. I am at heart with
the social philosophers. But then I am not typical
of the crowd. When my neighbor's elbow injects
itself into the small of my back, I twist around
and glower at him. I forget that his elbow is the
innocent mechanical result of a whole series of
elbows and backs extending the length of the car,
to where the first cause operates in the form of a
station-guard's shoulder ramming the human cat-
tle into their stalls. In the faces about me there
is no resentment. Instead of smashing windows,
instead of raising barricades in the Subway and
hanging the train-guards with their own lanterns
about their necks, the crowd sways and bends to
the lurching of the train, and young voices call
out cheerfully, " Plenty of room ahead."

Horribly good-natured! We have taken a
phrase which is the badge of our shame and turned

44 BELSHAZZAR COURT

it into a jest. Plenty of room ahead! If iiia
were a squat, ifl-fornied proletarian race obviously
predestined to subjection, one might understand.
But that a crowd of trim, well-cut, self-reliant
Americans, sharp-featured, alert, insolent as I
have called them, that they should submit is a
puzzle. Perhaps it is because of the fierce democ-
ra<^ of it alL The crush, the enforced intimacies
of physical contact, the feeling that a man's
natural condition is to push and be pushed, to
shove ahead when the opportunity offers and to
take it like a man when no chance presents itself
— that is equality. A seat in the Subway is like
the prizes of life for which men have fought in
these United States. You strug^e, you win or
lose. If the other man wins there is no envy ; ad-
miration rather, provided he has not shouldered
and elbowed out of reason. That god-like fre&lom
from envy is passing to-day, and perhaps the good
nature of the crowd in the Subway will pass. I
see signs of the approaching change. People do
not call out, "Plenty of room ahead," so fre-
quently as they used to.

Good-natured when dangling from the strap in
the Subway, good-natured in front of baseball
bulletins on Park Row, good-natured in the face of
so much oppression and injustice, where is the

THE STREET 45

supposed cruelty of the "mob"? I am ready to
affirm on oath that the mob is not vindictive, that
it is not cruel. It may be a bit sharp-tongued,
fickle, a bit mischievous, but in the heart of the
crowd there is no evil passion. The evil comes
from the leaders, the demagogues, the professional
distorters of right thinking and right feeling.
The crowd in the bleachers is not the clamorous,
brute mob of tradition. I have watched faces in
the bleachers and in the grand-stand and seen little
of that fury which is supposed to animate the fan.
For the most part he sits there with folded arms,
thin-lipped, eager, but after all conscious that
there are other things in life besides baseball. No,
it is the leaders, the baseball editors, the cartoon-
ists, the humorists, the professional stimulators of
" local pride," with their exaggerated gloatings
over a game won, their poisonous attacks upon a
losing team, who are responsible. It is these
demagogues who drill the crowd in the gospel of
loving only a winner — ^but if I keep on I shall be
in politics before I know it.

If you see in the homeward crowd in the Sub-
way a face over which the pall of depression has
settled, that face very likely is bent over the comic
pictures in the evening paper. I cannot recall
seeing anyone smile over these long serials of

46 BELSHAZZAR COURT

humorous adventure which run from day to day
and from year to year. I have seen readers turn
mechanically to these lurid comics and pore over
them, foreheads puckered into a frown, lips un-
consciously spelling out the long legends which
issue in the form of little balloons and lozenges
from that amazing portrait gallery of dwarfs,
giants, shrilling viragos and their diminutive hus-
bands, devil-children, quadrupeds, insects, — an
entire zoology. If any stimulus rises from these
pages to the puzzled brain, the effect is not visible.
I imagine that by dint of repetition througji the
years these grotesque creations have become a
reality to minions of readers. It is no Itmger a
question of humor, it is a vice. The Desperate
Desmonds, the Newly-weds, and the Dingbats,
have acquired a horrible fascination. Otherwise
I cannot see why readers of the funny page should
appear to be memorizing pages from Euclid.

This by way of anticipation. What the doctor
has said of exercise being a habit which grows
easy with time is true. It is the first five minutes
of walking that are wearisome. I find myself
strolling past Fourteenth Street, where I was to
take my train for Belshazzar Court. Never mind,
Forty-Second Street will do as well. I am now
on a different Broadway. The crowd is no Iraiger

THE STREET 47

north and south, but flows in every direction. It
is churned up at every corner and spreads itself
across the squares and open places. Its appear-
ance has changed. It is no longer a factory popu-
lation. Women still predominate, but they are
the women of the professions and trades which
center about Madison Square — ^business women of
independent standing, women from the magazine
offices, the publishing houses, the insurance offices.
You detect the bachelor girl in the current which
sets in toward the home quarters of the undomes-
ticated, the little Bohemias, the foreign eating-
places whose fixed table d'hote prices flash out in
illumined signs from the side streets. Still farther
north and the crowd becomes tinged. with the cur-
rent of that Broadway which the outside world
knows best. The idlers begin to mingle with the
workers, men appear in English clothes with canes,
women desperately corseted with plumes and
jeweled reticules. You catch the first heart-beat
of Little Old New York.

The first stirrings of this gayer Broadway die
down as quickly almost as they manifested them-
selves. The idlers and those who minister to them
have heard the call of the dinner hour and have
vanished, into hotel doors, into shabbier quarters
by no means in keeping with the cut of their gar-

48 BELSHAZZAR COURT

ments and their apparent indifference to useful
employment. Soon the street is aLuost empty. It
is not a beautiful Broadway in this garish interval
between the last of the matinee and shopping
crowd and the vanguard of the night crowd. The
monster electric sign-boards have not begun to
gleam and flash and revolve and confound the eye
and the senses. At night the electric Niagara
hides the squalid fronts of ugly brick, the dark
doorways, the clutter of fire-escapes, the rickety
wooden hoardings. Not an imperial street this
Broadway at G.30 of a summer's afternoon.
Cheap jewelry shops, cheap tobacconist's shops,
cheap haberdasheries, cheap restaurants, grimy
little newspaper agencies and ticket-offices, and
" demonstration " stores for patent foods, patent
waters, patent razors. . . .

O Gay White Way, you are far from gay in the
fast fading light, before the magic hand of Edison
wipes the wrinkles from your face and galvanizes
you into hectic vitality; far from alluring with
your tinsel shop-windows, with your puffy-faced,
unshaven men leaning against door-posts and
chewing pessimistic toothpicks, your sharp-eyed
newsboys wise with the wisdom of the Tenderloin,
and your itinerant women whose eyes flash from
side to side. It is not in this guise that you draw

THE STREET 49

the hearts of millions to yourself, O dingy, Gay
White Way, O Via Lobsteria Dolorosa!

Well, when a man begins to moralize it is time
to go home. I have walked farther than I in-
tended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and
tired. The romance of the crowd has disap-
peared. Romance cannot survive that short pas-
sage of Longacre Square, where the art of the
theater and of the picture-postcard flourish in an
atmosphere impregnated with gasoline. As I
glance into the windows of the automobile sales-
rooms and catch my own reflection in the enamel
of Babylonian limousines I find myself thinking all
at once of the children at home. They expand
and All up the horizon. Broadway disappears.
I smile into the face of a painted promenader,
but how is she to know that it is not at her I
smile but at the sudden recollection of what the
baby said at the breakfast-table that morning?
Like all good New Yorkers when they enter the
Subway, I proceed to choke up all my senses
against contact with the external world, and thus
resolving myself into a state of coma, I dip down
into the bowels of the earth, whence in due time
I am spewed out two short blocks from Belshazzar
Court.

m

THE SHOW

Fbom Belshazzar Court to the theater district
is only a thirty minutes' ride in the Subway, but
usually we reach the theater a few minutes after
the rise of the curtain. Why this should be I have
never been able to explain. It is a fact that on
such nights we have dinner half an hour early, and
Emmeline comes to the table quite ready to go out
except that she has her cloak to slip on. Never-
theless we are a few minutes late. While Emme-
Hne is slipping on her cloak I glance through
the editorial page in the evening paper, answer
the telephone, and recall several bits of work I
overlooked at the office. I then give Harold a
drink of water in bed, help Emmeline with her hat,
clean out the drawers in my writing-table, tell
Harold to stop talking to himself and go to sleep,
and hunt for the theater tickets in the pockets of
my street clothes. After that I have time to read
a page or two of John Galsworthy and go in to
see that Harold is well covered up. Emmeline

60

THE SHOW 51

always makes me save time by having me ring for
the elevator while she is drawing on her gloves.
Nevertheless we are a few minutes late for the first
act.

But if I frequently leave Belshazzar Court in a
state of mild irritation, my spirits rise the moment
we enter the Subway. I am stirred by the lights
and the crowd, this vibrant New York crowd of
which I have spoken before, so aggressively youth-
ful, so prosperous, so strikingly overdressed, and
carrying off its finery with a dash that is quite
remarkable considering that we are only a half-
way-up middle-class crowd jammed together in a
public conveyance. Since our trip abroad some
years ago I am convinced that the Parisian woman
needs all the chic and esprit she can encompass.
I will affirm that in half an hour in the Subway,
at any time of day, I see more charming faces than
we saw during six weeks in Paris. I have hitherto
been timid about expressing this opinion in print,
but only the other night I sat up to read Inno-
cents Abroad after many years. What Mark
Twain has to say of the Parisian grisette encour-
ages me to make this confession of faith. As I
swing from my strap and scan the happy, well-to-
do faces under the glow of the electric lamps, I
sometimes find myself wondering what reason

52 BELSHAZZAR COURT

William D. Haywood can possibly have for being
dissatisfied with things as they are.

We are usually late at the theater, but not al-
ways. There are times when Harold will get
through with his dinner without being once called
to order. He then announces that he is tired and
is anxious to get into bed. On such occasions
Emmeline grows exceedingly nervous. She feels
his head and makes him open his mouth and say,
" Aaa-h-h," so that she may look down his throat.
If Harold carries out his promise and does
promptly go to sleep, it intensifies our anxiety and
threatens to spoil our evening; but it does also
save a little time. It brings us to the theater a
minute or two before the curtain goes up, and
gives us a chance to study the interior decorations
of the auditorium, completed at great cost, the
exact amount of which I cannot recall without
my evening paper. If you wiU remember that we
go to the theater perhaps a dozen times during
the season, and that the number of new theaters
on Broadway every season is about that number,
you will see why very frequently we should be
finding ourselves in a new house.

It is a matter of regret to me that I cannot
grow enthusiastic over theatrical interiors. I do
my best, but the novel arrangement of proscenium

THE SHOW 58

boxes and the upholstery scheme leave me cold. I
recall what the evening paper said of the new
Blackfriars. Its architecture is a modification of
the Parthenon at Athens, and it is nine stories
high and equipped with business offices and bache-
lor quarters. It was erected as one of a chain
of amusement houses stretching clear across to
San Francisco, by a manager who began three
years ago as a moving-picture impresario in the
Bronx. Having made a hit in the " legitimate "
with an unknown actress in a play by an unknown
writer, he immediately signed a contract with the
playwright for his next six plays, hired six com-
panies for the road, and built a chain of theaters
to house the plays. This is the American of it.
If three years from now this Napoleon of Long-
acre Square is back at his five-cent moving-picture
place in the Bronx it will also be the American
of it. When I tell Emmeline that the ceiling has
been copied from a French chateau, she looks up
and says nothing.

The curtain goes up on the famous ten-thou-
sand-dollar drawing-room set which has been the
hit of the season. The telephone on the real Louis
XVI table rings, the English butler comes in to
answer the call, and the play is on. The ex-
traordinary development of the telephone on the

5* BELSHAZZAR COURT

New York stage is possibly our most notable and
meritorious contribution to contemporary dra-
matic art. The telephone serves a far higher
purpose than Sardou's parlor-maid with the
feather-duster. It is plain, of course, that the
dramatist's first pui^ose is to sound a universal
human note. And the telephone is something which
comes very close to every one of us. If the Eng-
lish butler, instead of answering a telephone call,
picks up the instrument and himself calls for some
familiar number, like 3100 Spring, which is Police
Headquarters, you can actually perceive the re-
sponsive thrill which sweeps the house. The note
of universal humanity has been struck.

This point is worth keeping in mind. If I am
somewhat insistent on being in time for the be-
ginning of the play, it is because I want to subject
myself to the magic touch of the telephone bell,
and not because I am afraid of missing the drift
of the playwright's story. Of that there is no
danger, because I know the story already. I don't
know whether college courses in the drama still
spend as much time as they used to fifteen years
ago in laying emphasis on the fact that the first
act of a play is devoted to exposition. If college
courses are really as modem as they are said to
be, professors of the drama wiU now be teaching

THE SHOW 55

their students that the playwright's real prepara-
tion for his conflict and his climax is not to be
found in the first act at all, but several weeks be-
fore the play is produced, in the columns of the
daily press.

If Goethe were writing Fcmst to-day he would
not lay his Prologue in Heaven but in the news-
papers. I know what I am about to see and hear,
because I have read all the newspaper chatter
while the play was in incubation and in rehearsal.
I have been taken into confidence by the managers
just before they sailed for Europe in the imperial
suite of the Imperator. If they omitted anything,
they have cabkd it over from Paris at enormous
expense. Through interviews with stars and lead-
ing ladies, through calculated indiscretions on the
part of the box-office with regard to advance sales,
through the newspaper reviews after the first
night, I am educated up to the act of seeing a
play with a thoroughness that the post-graduate
department of Johns Hopkins might envy.

Consequently, there is not the slightest danger,
even if we come late, that I shall laugh in the
wrong place or fail to laugh in the right place, or
that Emmeline will fail to grope for her handker-
chief at the right time. Through the same agency
of the newspaper the funniest lines, the strongest

56 BELSHAZZAR COURT

"punch," the most sympathetic bits of dialogue
have been located and charted. At college I used
to be told that the tremendous appeal of the Greek
drama was dependent in large measure on the fact
that it dealt with stories which were perfectly
familiar to the public. The Athenian audience
came to the theater expectant, surcharged with
emotion, waiting eagerly for the proper cue to
let its feelings go. But Athens was not con-
ceivably better worked up than New York is to-
day when it goes to the theater.

Even James M. Barrie does it. I remember
when Emmeline and I went to see Barrie's What
Every Woman Knows, some years ago. What we
really went for, like ten thousand other good peo-
ple of New York, was to hear the much-advertised
tag with which Barrie ended his play, to the effect,
namely, that woman was not made out of man's
rib but out of his funny bone. I do not recall
that a single dramatic reviewer in New York after
the first night omitted to concentrate on that
epigram ; if he did he must have been called down
severely by the managing editor. Now it is my
sincere belief that the Barrie joke is a poor one.
It is offensively smart, it has the " punch " which
it is Barrie's merit to omit so regularly from his
plays. It is inferior to any number of delightful

THE SHOW 57

lines in that really beautiful play. That is, I say
so now when I am in my right senses. But when
Emmeline and I, under the hypnotic speU of the
newspapers, went to see What Every Woman
Knows, what was it that we waited for through
four longish acts, — what but that unhappy quip
which everybody else was waiting for? Of course
we laughed and applauded. We laughed in the
same shamefaced and dutiful spirit in which
people stand up in restaurants when the band
plays the " Star-Spangled Banner." Often I
wonder what would Shakespeare and Moliere not
have accomplished if they had had the newspapers
to hypnotize the audience for them instead of be-
ing compelled to do so themselves.

Hypnotism everywhere. One of the popular
plays that we never went to see was recommended
to Emmeline by a very charming woman who said
it was a play which every woman ought to take
her husband to see. In itself that is as admirable
a bit of dramatic criticism as could be distilled out
of several columns of single-leaded minion. But
the trouble was that this charming woman had not
thought it out for herself. She had found the
phrase in the advertising notices of this play. It
was so pat, so quotable, and the press agent was
so evidently sincere in using it, that it seemed a

58 BELSHAZZAR COURT

pity not to pass it on to others. After half a
dozen friends had recommended the play to Em-
meline as a good one for me to be taken to, she
rebelled and said she would not go. She was in-
tellectually offended. Her ostensible reason was
that she doubted whether the play would do me
any good. I had my revenge not long after when
I offered to take her to a play which dealt with
woman's extravagance in dress, and which the ad-
vertisements said every man ought to take his wife
to see. Emmeline said that my sense of hiomor
often betrays me.

This, I am sorry to say, happens rather fre-
quently. My feeble jest about the play which all
wives ought to be taken to see was devised on the
spur of the moment. But there is one sly bit of
humor which I regularly employ and which I never
fail to regret. This happens whenever, in reply
to Emmeline's suggestion that we take in one of
the new plays, I say with malice aforethought that
the piece is one to which a man would hardly care
to take his wife. The res^ponse is instantaneous.
It makes no difference that our views on this sub-
ject are identical. Apostrophizing me as an ex-
emplar of that muddle-headed thing which is inter-
changeably known as fossilized Puritanism and
Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, Emmeline begins by ask-

THE SHOW 59

ing whether a play that is not fit for a man's
wife to see is fit for the husband of that wife.
Since I agree with her, the question remains un-
answerable. She then goes on to ask whether it
might not be an excellent thing for the theater to
abolish the distinction between plays that a man's
wife can see and those she cannot see, and to make
it a law, preferably a Federal law based on social
justice, that no man shall be allowed to enter a
theater without a woman companion.

It is a sore point with her. We had as guest
at dinner one night an estimable young man who
told us that, being anxious to take his betrothed to
a certain play, he had bought a ticket for the
family circle the night before, to see whether the
play was a fit one for the young woman to be taken
to. Emmeline cast one baleful glance at the young
man, which he fortunately failed to catch, his
head being bent over the asparagus. But she has
never asked him to call again. To me, afterward,
she scarified the poor young man.

" Imagine," she said. " Here is a man in love
with a woman. He is about to take her, and give
himself to her, for better and for worse. He asks
her to face the secrets of life and the fear of death
with him. But he is afraid to take her to the
theater with him."

60 BELSHAZZAR COURT

The joy of combat makes me forget that my
views are quite the same.

" It shows his thoughtfulness," I said. " There
are any number of nasty plays in town."

"Why are they here?" she asked.

" I'm sure I don't know."

" I'll tell you why," she said : " to meet the de-
mand for plays that a man cannot ta;ke his wife
to."

I assured her that this common phrase really
did not mean all she read into it. The average
citizen, I said, does not look upon his wife as a
tender plant to be shielded against the breath of
harm. It was only another instance of oiir falling
in with a phrase, and repeating it in parrot
fashion, until we are surprised to find ourselves
living up to it. But Emmeline said it was Anglo-
Saxon hypocrisy superimposed on the universal
SMavenmoral from which woman suffers. At this
point I am convinced that a sense of humor often
does betray one.

Steeped in the sincere, if often ferociously
sincere, realism of the Russian writers, it is plain
why one should revolt against the catch-phrases
which make up so large a part of our speech and
thought. Because she knows the realism of
European literature, Emmeline grows angry with

THE SHOW 61

the stage manager's realism in which we have made
such notable progress of late. She has refused to
be impressed by Mr. Belasco's marvelous repro-
duction of a cheap restaurant, in which the tiled
walls, the coffee-urns, the cash-registers, and the
coat-racks were so unmistakably actual as to
make a good many of us forget that the action
which takes place in this restaurant might just as
well have taken place in the Aquarium or on top
of the Jungfrau. There was another play. For
weeks, the author, the producer, and several as-
sistants (I am now quoting press authority) had
been searching the city for the exact model of a
hall bedroom in a theatrical boarding-house such
as the playwright had in mind. They found what
they were looking for. When the curtain rose on
the opening night, the public, duly kept informed
as to the progress of the quest, naturally rose
with enthusiasm to the perfect picture of a mean
chamber in a squalid boarding-house. The scene
was appalling in its detail of tawdry poverty.
Except for the fact that the bedroom was about
sixty feet long, forty feet wide, and fifty feet high,
the effect of destitution was startling.

But there is a more dangerous realism. Our
stage has progressed beyond this actuality of real
doors with real door-knobs. We have attained as

62 BELSHAZZAR COURT

far as the external realism of human types. As
exhibited on the stage to-day, the shop-girls, the
" crooks," the detectives, the clerks, the traveling
salesmen, the shady financiers, are startlingly true
to life in appearance, in walk, in speech. For that
one ought presumably to be thankful. Pre-
siunably it is progress to have shop-girls, clerks,
financiers, " crooks," and their pursuers, instead
of Pinero's drawing-room heroines and bounders,
or Henry Bernstein's highly galvanized boule-
vardiers. If people with the look of Broadway,
with the tang and speech of Broadway, walk the
boards, what more would one have ?

" Soul," says Emmeline, and she lashes out at
the beautifully made puppets on the stage. Ex-
ternal realism has gone as far as it may, but be-
neath the surface everything is false. The life of
these amazingly lifelike figures is false, the story
is false, the morals and the conclusions are false.
At bottom it is tawdry melodrama. New tricks of
the trade have been mastered, but the same crude,
childish views of life confront us, and the same
utter lack of that form which is the joy of art.
The American stage never had an excess of form.
We have less now than we ever had.

As I think back over the last few paragraphs I
find that I may have given an utterly wrong im-

THE SHOW 63

pression of how the theater affects Emmeline and
me. It would be deplorable if the reader should
get to think that we are high-brows. It is quite
the other way. Between the acts and at home,
the two of us may be tremendously critical, but
while the business of the stage is under way we
are grateful for the least excuse to yield ourselves
to the spirit of the thing. Provided, only, there
is nothing in the play about a young woman who
beards a king of finance and frightens him into
surrendering a million dollars' worth of bonds.
Financiers and their female private secretaries I
cannot abide. Otherwise, I delight in nearly
everything: in The Old Homestead, in George M.
Cohan, in Fanny's First Play, and in the farce-
comedies where a recreant husband, surprised by
his wife, steps backward into his own suit-case.
Emmeline confesses that she has seldom seen a
proposal of marriage on the stage without want-
ing to sniffle sympathetically.

Because I take pleasure in seeing frivolous
young men step into their own suit-cases I am not
averse to musical comedy. Emmeline rarely ac-
companies me; not because she is afraid that it is
the kind of a play a man should not take his wife
to, but because it does not interest her. She is
fond of Gilbert and Sullivan, and she likes The

64 BELSHAZZAR COURT

Chocolate Soldier; but of our own native musical
comedy I think she has seen only one example.

The play was called The Girl from Grand
Rapids. The principal characters are an Ameri-
can millionaire and his daughter who are traveling
in Switzerland. They come to the little village of
Sprudelsaltz and are mistaken by the popidace
for the German Kaiser and his Chancellor who
are expected on a secret mission. The American
millionaire, in order to outwit a business rival who
belongs to the Furniture Trust, consents to play
the part. He accounts for the apparent sex of
his Chancellor by declaring that the evil designs
of certain French spies have made it necessary for
his companion to assume this peculiar disguise.
The Chancellor falls in love with the yoimg
British attache, who has come to Switzerland
for the purpose of unearthing certain important
secrets relative to the German navy. At their
first meeting the supposed German Chancellor and
the British naval attache sing a duet of which the
refrain is, " Oh, take me back to Bryant Square."
Ultimately the identity of the pseudo Kaiser and
his Chancellor is discovered. They are threatened
by the infuriated Swiss populace in fur jackets
and tights, and are saved only through the inter-
vention of a comic Irish waiter named Gansen-

THE SHOW 65

Schmidt. They escape from Switzerland and in
the second act we find them at Etah, in Green-
land, where the millionaire's daughter is compelled
to wed an Eskimo chieftain who turns out to be
the British naval attache in disguise. The third
act shows an Arab carnival in the Sahara. Re-
peatedly, in the course of the evening, Emmeline
asked me why I laughed.

There is also a business motive in my playgoing.
I am learning how to build a complicated dramatic
plot. Years ago I set out to write a play. Like
all people of slipshod habits I have sudden at-
tacks of acute systematization, and when I began
my play, I assigned so much time for working
out the plot, so much for character-development,
so much for actually writing the dialogue. The
scheme did not quite work out. I forget the de-
tails ; the point is that at the end of a year I had
written all my dialogue, but had made little prog-
ress with my character-development and had done
nothing whatever on my plot. Since that time I
have moved ahead. My characters are to me
fairly alive now. But I still have a plot and inci-
dents to find for my play. Emmeline says that
my quest is a vain one. She is convinced that I
have no gift for dramatic complication, and that
the best I can hope for is to do something like

66 BELSHAZZAR COURT

Bernard Shaw. But I refuse to give in. I go
to see how other men have done the trick, and
some day, who knows, I may yet find a skele-
ton on which to hang my polished and spirited
dialogue.

Between the acts there are two things which one
naturally does. I read in the programme what
men will wear during the winter, and I scan faces,
a habit which I find growing upon me in all sorts
of public places and which will some day bring me
into serious trouble. People are rather stolid be-
tween the acts. It is a very rare play in which
the sense of illusion carries over from one act to
the next and is reflected in the faces of the spec-
tators. The perfect play, as I conceive it, should
keep the audience in a single mood from be-
ginning to end. Between the fall and the rise of
the curtain the spell ought to hold and show itself
in a flushed, bright-eyed gayety, in a feverish
chatter which should carry on the playwright's
message until he resumes the business of his nar-
rative. But as a rule I am not exalted between
the acts, and I perceive that my neighbors are not.
It is not a play we are watching, but three or four
separate plays. When the curtain descends we
lean back into an ordinary world. The business
of the stage drops from us. We resume conversa-

THE SHOW 67

tion interrupted in the Subway. A young woman
on the left furnishes her companion with details
of last night's dance. Two young men in front
argue over the cost of staging the piece. One
says it cost $10,000, and the other says $15,000,
and they pull out their favorite evening papers
from under the seat and quote them to each other.
Emmeline wonders whether she looked down far
enough into Harold's throat when he said,
" Aaa-h-h."

It is not entirely our own fault if we lose the
sense of continuous illusion between the acts.
There is little in the ordinary play to carry one
forward from one act to the next. We still talk
of suspense and movement and climax, whereas
our plays are not organic plays at all, but mere
vaudeville. They do not depend for their effect
on cumulative interest, but on the individual
" punch." Drama, melodrama, comedy, and farce
have their own laws. But our latest dramatic
form combines all forms in a swift medley of ef-
fects that I can describe by no other term than
vaudeville. George M. Cohan is our representa-
tive dramatist, not because he has flung the star-
spangled banner to the breeze, but because he has
cast all consistency to the winds. Who ever heard
of a melodramatic farce? Mr. Cohan is writing

68 BELSHAZZAR COURT

them all the time. They are plays in which peo-
ple threaten each other with automatic pistols to
the accompaniment of remarks which elicit roars
of laughter.

I know, of course, that Shakespeare has a
drunken porter on the stage while Macbeth is do-
ing Duncan to death. But George M. Cohan is
different. I have in mind a homeless little village
heroine of Mr. Cohan's who is about to board a
train for the great city with its pitfalls and pri-
vations. Emmeline was quite affected by the
pathetic little figure on the platform, with the
shabby suit-case — until six chorus men in beauti-
fully creased trousers waltzed out on the train
platform and did a clog-dance and sang, " Good-
by, Mary, don't forget to come back home." I
can't conceive Shakespeare doing this sort of
thing. It is gripping while it lasts, but when the
curtain falls, one chiefly thinks how late it wiU be
before one gets home.

But if the playwright's story does not always
hold me, the people on the stage seldom fail to
bring me under the spell. I am not a professional
critic and I have no standards of histrionic skill
to apply. It may be, as people say, that our
actors are deficient in imagination, in the power
of emotional utterance, in facial eloquence, in

THE SHOW 69

the art of creating illusion. Perhaps it is true
that they seldom get into the skin of their charac-
ters, and never are anything but themselves. But
precisely because they are themselves I like them.
I like their lithe, clean-cut length, their strong,
clean-shaven faces, their faultless clothes. I like
the frequency with which they change from morn-
ing to evening dress. I like the ease with which
they order taxicabs, press buttons for the club
waiter, send out cablegrams to Shanghai, and
make appointments to meet at expensive road-
houses which are reached only by automobile.
The nonchalance with which George M. Cohan's
people distribute large sums is a quickening
spectacle to me.

After this it will be difficult for anyone to ac-
cuse me of being a high-brow. Let me dispose
of this matter beyond all doubt. I do not under-
stand what people mean when they speak of in-
tellectual actors and the intellectual interpreta-
tion of stage roles. Possibly it is a defective
imagination in me which makes me insist that
actors shall look their part physically. Not all
the imaginative genius in the world will reconcile
me to a thin FalstafF, suggestive of vegetarianism
and total abstinence. I am not even sure that I
know what an intellectualized Hamlet is. I in-

70 BELSHAZZAR COURT

sist upon a Hamlet who shall wear black and who
shall recite slowly the lines which shake me so
when I read them at home, instead of intellectu-
ally swallowing the lines as so many do. I cannot
see how Mrs. Fiske's intellectuality qualifies her
for playing robust, full-blooded women like Tess,
or like Cyprienne in Divorfons. But I like Mrs.
Fiske as Becky Sharpe and as Ibsen's Nora, be-
cause both were small women.

I imagine it is a sign of Wagner's genius that
he made all his women of heroic stature. He must
have foreseen that by the time a singer has
learned to interpret Briinhilde she is apt to be
mature and imposing. Thus I feel; and I know
that most of the people in the audience agree
with me. Those who do not have probably read
in their evening papers that they were about to
see an intellectual interpretation. Whenever
they are puzzled by the actor they ascribe it to
his intellect.

When the final curtain falls, the play drops
from us like a discarded cloak. People smile, dress,
tell each other that it was a pretty good show,
and hold the door open for the ladies to pass out
into the glow and snap of Broadway. We do not
carry illusion away with us from the theater. In
spite of the fact that we have purchased our

THE SHOW 71

tickets in the conviction that every husband and
wife ought to see the play, we do not correlate
the theater with life. Primarily it is a show. We
do not ask much. If it has offered us a hearty
laugh or two, a thrill, a pressure on the tear-
ducts, this tolerant American public, this patient,
innocent, cynical public that is always prepared
to be cheated, feels grateful; and there ends the
matter.

And Aristotle? And the purging of the emo-
tions through pity and terror.? I still remember
a play called The Diamond Breaker, which I saw
on Third Avenue when Benjamin Harrison was
President. I remember how the young mining en-
gineer was foully beset by his rival and tied hand
and foot and dropped into the open chute that
led straight into the pitiless iron teeth of the
stone-crushing machine. I remember how the
heroine rushed out upon the gangway and seized
the young engineer by the hair; and the wheels
stopped ; and the girl fainted ; and strong men in
the audience wept. Is it my own fault that such
sensations are no longer to be had? Or has the
drama indeed degenerated within these twenty
years ?

From the evening papers I gather that the
crowd, after leaving the new nine-story Black-

72 BELSHAZZAR COURT

friars Theater, modeled after the Parthenon at
Athens, invades and overruns the all-night res-
taurants on Broadway. Yet the trains in the
Subway are jammed, and Emmeline has to stand
more than halfway to Belshazzar Court.

IV

THE GAME

Often I think how monotonous life must be to
Jerome D. Travers or Francis Ouimet, — com-
pared, that is, with what life can offer to a player
of my quality. When Travers drives off, it is a
question whether the ball will go 245 yards or 260
yards; and a difference of fifteen yards is ob-
viously nothing to thrill over. Whereas, when I
send the ball from the tee the possible range of
variation is always 100 yards, running from 155
down to 55 ; provided, that is, that the ball starts
at all. To me there is always a freshness of
surprise in having the club meet the ball, which
Travers, I dare say, has not experienced in the
last dozen years.

With him, of course, it is not sport, but mathe-
matics. A wooden club will give one result, an
iron another. The sensation of getting greater
distance with a putting iron than with a brassie

73

74 BELSHAZZAR COURT

is something Ouimet can hardly look forward to.
Always mathematics, with this kind of swing
laying the ball fifteen feet on the farther side of the
hole, and that kind of chop laying it ten feet on
the nearer side. I have frequently thought that
playing oiF the finals for the golf championship is
a waste of time. All that is necessary is to call
in Professor Miinsterberg and have him test
Travers's blood-pressure and reaction index on
the morning of the game, and then take " Chick "
Evans's blood-pressure and reaction index. The
referee would then award the game to Travers
or to Evans by 2 up and 1 to play, or whatever
score Professor Miinsterberg's figures would in-
dicate.

The true zest of play is for the duffer. When
he swings club or racket he can never tell what
miracles of accomplishment or negation it will
perform. That is not an inanimate instrument
he holds in his hands, but a living companion, a
totem comrade whom he is impelled to propitiate,
as Hiawatha crooned to his arrow before letting
it fly from the string. And that is why duffers
are peculiarly qualified to write about games, or
for that matter, about everything, — literature,
music, or art, — as they have always done. To be
sufficiently inexpert in anything is to be filled

THE GAME 75

with corresponding awe at the hidden soul in that
thing. To be sufficiently removed from perfec-
tion is to worship it. Poets, for example, are
preeminently the interpreters of life because they
make such an awful mess of the practice of living.
And for the same reason poets always retain the
zest of life — ^because the poet never knows
whether his next shot will land him on the green
or in the sandpit, in Heaven or in the gutter. The
reader will now be aware that in describing my
status as a golfer I am not making a suicidal
confession. On the contrary, I am presenting my
credentials.

n

A great many people have been searching dur-
ing ever so many years for the religion of democ-
racy. I believe I have found it. That is, not a
religion, if by it you mean a system completely
equipped with creed, formularies, organization,
home and foreign missions, schisms, an empty-
church problem, an underpaid-minister's problem,
a Socialist and I. W. W. problem, and the like ;
although, if I had the time to pursue my re-
searches, I might find a parallel to many of these
things. What I have in mind is a great demo-
cratic rite, a ceremonial which is solemnized on

76 BELSHAZZAE COURT

six days in the week during six months in the
year by large masses of men with such unfailing
regularity and such unquestioning good faith that
I cannot help thinking of it as essentially a re-
ligious performance.

It is a simple ceremonial, but impressive, like
all manifestations of the soul of a multitude. I
need only close my eyes to call up the picture
Tividly: It is a day of brilliant sunshine and a
great crowd of men is seated in the open air, a
crowd made up of all conditions, ages, races, tem-
peraments, and states of mind. The crowd has
sat there an hour or more, while the afternoon
sun has slanted deeper into the west and the
shadows have crept across greensward and hard-
baked clay to the eastern horizon. Then, almost
with a single motion, — ^the time may be some-
where between four-thirty and five o'clock, — this
multitude of divers minds and tempers rises to its
feet and stands silent, while one might count
twenty perhaps. Nothing is said; no hi^ priest
intones prayer for this vast congregation; never-
theless the impulse of ten thousand hearts is
obviously focused into a single desire. When
you have counted twenty the crowd sinks back to
the benches. A half minute at most and the rite
is over.

THE GAME 77

I am speaking, of course, of the second half of
the seventh inning, when the home team comes to
bat. The precise nature of this rehgious half
minute depends on the score. If the home team
holds a safe lead of three or four runs; if the
home pitcher continues to show everything, and
the infield gives no sign of cracking, and the out-
field isn't bothered by the sun, then I always
imagine a fervent Te Deum arising from that in-
articulate multitude, and the peace of a great
contentment falling over men's spirits as they
settle back in their seats. If the game is in the
balance you must imagine the concentration of ten
thousand wills on the spirit of the nine athletes
in the field, ten thousand wills telepathically pour-
ing their energies into the powerful arm of the
man in the box, into the quick eye of the man on
first base, and the sense of justice of the umpire.

But if the outlook for victory is gloomy, the
rite does not end with the silent prayer I have
described. As the crowd subsides to the benches
there arises a chant which I presume harks back
to the primitive litanies of the Congo forests.
Voices intone unkind words addressed to the play-
ers on the other team. Ten thousand voices
chanting in unison for victory, twenty thousand
feet stamping confusion to the opposing pitcher

78 BELSHAZZAR COURT

— ^if this is not worship of the most fundamental
sort, because of the most primitive sort, then
what is religion?

Consider the mere number of participants in
this national rite of the seventh inning. I have
said a multitude of ten thousand. But if the day
be Saturday and the place of worship one of the
big cities of either of the major leagues, the
crowd may easily be twice as large. And all over
the country at almost the same moment, exultant
or hopeful or despairing multitudes are rising to
their feet. Multiply this number of worshipers by
six days — or by seven days if you are west of the
Alleghanies, where Sunday baseball has somehow
been reconciled with a still vigorous Puritanism
— and it is apparent that a continuous wave of
spiritual ardor sweeps over this continent between
three-thirty and six p.m. from the middle of April
to the middle of October. We can only guess at
the total number of worshipers. The three major
leagues will account for five millions. Add the
minor leagues and the state leagues and the in-
terurban contests — and the total of seventh-in-
ning communicants grows overwhelming. Take
the twenty-five million males of voting age in this
country, assume one visit per head to a baseball
park in the season, and the result is dazzling.

THE GAME 79

It is easier to estimate the number of wor-
shipers than the intensity of the mood. I have
no gauge for measuring the spiritual fervor which
exhales on the baseball stadiums of the country
from mid-April to mid-October, growing in ardor
with the procession of the months, until it at-
tains a climax of orgiastic frenzy in the World's
Series. Foreigners are in the habit of calling this
an unspiritual nation. But what nation so fre-
quently tastes — or for that matter has ever
tasted — the emotional experience of the score
tied in the ninth inning with the bases full? For-
eigners call us an unspiritual people because they
do not know the meaning of a double-header late
in September — a double-header with two seventh
innings.

I began by renouncing any claim to the discov-
ery of a complete religion of democracy. But
the temptation to point out parallels is irresistible.
If Dr. Frazer had not finished with his Golden
BotigJi, — or if he is thinking of a supplementary
volume, — ^I can see how easily the raw material
of the sporting columns would shape itself to
religious forces and systems in his hands. If
religious ceremonial has its origin in the play in-
stinct of man, why go back to remote origins like
the Australian corroboree and neglect Ty Cobb

80 BELSHAZZAR COURT

stealing second? If religion has its origin in
primitive man's worship of the eternal rebirth of
earth's fructifying powers with the advent of
spring, how can we neglect the vivid stirring in
the hearts of millions that marks the departure
of the teams for spring training in Texas?

If I were a trained professional sociologist in-
stead of a mere spectator at the Polo Grounds, it
seems to me that I should have little trouble in
tracing the history of the game several thousand
years back of its commonly accepted origin some-
where about 1830. I could easily trace back the
catcher's mask to the mask worn by the medicine-
man among the Swahili of the West Coast. The
three bases and home-plate would easily be the
points of the compass, going straight back to
the sun myth. Murray pulling down a fly in left
field would hark back straight to Zoroaster and
the sun-worshipers. Millions of primitive hmiters
must have anointed, and prayed to, their weapons
before Jeff Tesreau addressed his invocation to
the spit ball; and when Mathewson winds himself
up for delivering the ball, he is not far removed
from the sacred warrior dancer of Polynesia. If
only I were a sociologist!

An ideal faith, this religion of baseball, the
more you examine it. See, for instance, how it

THE GAME 81

satisfies the prime requirement of a true faith that
it shall ever be present in the hearts of the faith-
ful; practiced not once a week on Sunday, but six
times a week — and in the West seven times a
week; professed not only in the appointed place
of worship, but in the Subway before the game,
and in the Subway after the game, and in the
offices and shops and factories on rainy days. If
a true religion is that for which a man will give
up wife and children and forget the call of meat
and drink, what shall we say of baseball? If a
true religion is not dependent on sesthetic trap-
pings, but voices itself under the open sky and
among the furniture of common life, this is again
the true religion. The stadium lies open to the
sun, the rain, and the wind. The mystic sense is
not stimulated by Gothic roof-traceries and the
dimmed light of stained-glass windows. The con-
gregation rises from wooden benches on a con-
crete flooring ; it stands in the full light of a sum-
mer afternoon and lets its eyes rest on walls of
bill-boards reminiscent of familiar things, — linen
collars, table-waters, tobacco, safety-razors.
Surely we have here a clear, dry, real religion of
the kind that Bernard Shaw would approve.

I have said quite enough on this point. Other-
wise I should take time to show how this national

82 BELSHAZZAR COURT

faith has created its own architecture, as all great
religions have done. Our national contribution
to the building arts has so far been confined to
two forms — ^the skyscraper and the baseball
stadium, corresponding precisely to the two great
religions of business and of play. I know that the
Greeks and Romans had amphitheaters, and that
the word stadium is not of native origin. But
between the Coliseum and the baseball park there
is all the difference that lies between imperialism
and democracy. The ancient amphitheaters were
built as much for monuments as for playgrounds.
Consequently they were impressed with an aesthetic
character which is totally repugnant to our idea
of a baseball park.

There is no spiritual resemblance between Ves-
pasian's amphitheater with its stone and marble,
its galleries and imperial tribunes, its purple
canvases stretched out against the sun — and our
own Polo Grounds. Iron girders, green wooden
benches, and a back fence frescoed with safety-
razors and ready-made clothing — what more would
a modem man have.? The ancient amphitheaters
were built for slaves who had to be flattered and
amused by pretty things. The baseball park is
for freemen who pay for their pleasures and can
afford the ugliest that money can buy.

THE GAME 83

m

The art of keeping my eye on the ball is some-
thing I no longer have hope of mastering. If I
fail to watch the ball it is because I am continu-
ally watching faces about me. The same habit
pursues me on the street and in all public places
— usually with unpleasant consequences, though
now and then I have the reward of catching the
reflection of a great event or a tense moment in
the face of the man next to me. Then, indeed, I
am repaid; but it is a procedure fatal to the
scientific pursuit of baseball. While I am hunt-
ing in the face of the man next to me for the re-
flection of Doyle's stinging single between first and
second base, I hear a roar and turn to find that
something dramatic has happened at third, and a
stout young man in a green hat behind me says
that the runner was out by a yard and should be
benched for trying to spike the man on the bag.
The eagle vision of the stout young man behind
me always fills me with amazement and envy. I
concede his superior knowledge of the game. He
knows every man on the field by his walk. He
recalls under what circumstances the identical
play was pulled off three years ago in Philadel-
phia. He knows beforehand just at what moment

84. BELSHAZZAR COURT

Mr. McGraw will take his left fielder out of the
game and send in a " pinch hitter." Long years
of steady application will no doubt supply this
kind of post-graduate expertship. But when it
is a question not of theory but of a simple, con-
crete play which I did happen to be watching
carefully, how is it that the man behind me can
see that the runner was out by a yard and had
nearly spiked the man on the bag, whereas all I
can see is a tangle of legs and arms and a cloud
of dust? My eyesight is normal; how does my
neighbor manage to see all that he does as quickly
as he does?

The answer is that he does not see. When he
declares that the runner was out by a yard, and
I turn around and regard him with envy, it is a
comfort to have the umpire decide that the runner
was safe after all. It is a comfort to hear the
man behind me say that the ball cut the plate
squarely, and to have the umpire call it a ball. It
shakes my faith somewhat in human nature, but
it strengthens my self-confidence. Yet it fails to
shake the self-confidence of the man behind me.
When I turn about to see his crestfallen face, I
find him chewing peanut-brittle in a state of su-
preme calm, and as I stare at him, fascinated by
such peace of mind in the face of discomfiture, I

THE GAME 85

hear a yell and turn to find the third baseman
and all the outfield congregated near the left
bleachers. I have made a psychological observa-
tion, but have missed the beginning of a double
play.

My chagrin is temporary. As the game goes
on my self-confidence grows enormously. I am
awakening to the fact that the man behind me
knows as little about the game as I do. When
the pitcher of the visiting team delivered the first
ball of the first inning, the man behind me re-
marked that the pitcher didn't have anything.
My neighbor could tell by the pitcher's arm ac-
tion that he was stale, and he recalled that the
pitcher in question never did last more than half
a game. This declaration of absolute belief did
not stand in the way of a contradictory remark,
made some time in the fifth inning, with our team
held so far to two scratch hits. The stout young
man behind me then said that the visiting pitcher
was a wonder, that he had everything, that he
would keep on fanning them till the cows came
home, and that he was, in fact, the best southpaw
in both leagues, having once struck out eight men
in an eleven-inning game at Boston.

When a man gives vent to such obviously irrec-
oncilable statements in less than five innings, it

86 BELSHAZZAR COUET

is inevitable that I should turn in my seat to get
a square look at him. But I still find him calm
and eating peanut-brittle; and as I stare at him
and try to classify him, the man at the bat does
something which b;-ings half the crowd to its feet.
By dint of much inquiry I discover that he has
rolled a slow grounder to third and has made his
base on it. Decidedly, psychology and baseball
win not mix.

I suppose the stout young man behind me is a
Fan, — provided there is really such a type. My
own belief is that the Fan, as the baseball writers
and cartoonists have depicted him, is a very rare
thing. To the extent that he does exist he is the
creation, not of the baseball diamond, but of the
sporting writer and the comic artist. The Fan
models himself consciously upon the type set be-
fore him in his favorite newspaper. It is once
more a case of nature imitating art. If Mr. Gib-
son, many years ago, had not drawn a picture of
fat men in shirt-sleeves, perspiring freely and
waving straw hats, the newspaper artist would
not have imitated Mr. Gibson, and the baseball
audience would not have imitated the newspapers.
It is true that I have seen baseball crowds in
frenzy; but these have been isolated moments of
high tension when all of us have been brought to

THEGAME 87

our feet with loud explosions of joy or agony.
But the perspiring, ululant Fan in shirt-sleeves,
ceaselessly waving his straw hat, uttering impre-
cations on the enemy, his enthusiasm obviously
aroused by stimulants preceding his arrival at
the baseball park, is far from being representative
of the baseball crowd.

The spirit of the audience is best expressed in
quite a different sort of person. He is always
to be seen at the Polo Grounds, and when I think
of baseball audiences it is he who rises before me,
to the exclusion of his fat, perspiring brother with
the straw hat. He is young, tall, slender, wears
blue serge, and even on very cool days in the early
spring he goes without an overcoat. He sits out
the game with folded arms, very erect, thin-lipped,
and with the break of a smile around the eyes.
He is usually alone, and has little to say. He is
not a snob; he will respond to his neighbor's com-
ments in moments of exceptional emotional stress,
but he does not wear his heart on his sleeve.

I imagine him sitting, in very much the same
attitude, in college lecture-rooms, or taking in-
structions from the head of the. office. Complete
absorption under complete control — he fascinates
me. While the stout young man behind me chat-
ters on for his own gratification, forgetting one

88 BELSHAZZAR COURT

moment what he said the moment before, — ^an
empty-headed young man with a tendency to pro-
fanity as the game goes on, — ^this other trim
young figure in blue serge, with folded arms, sits
immobile, watchiilg, watching with a calm that
must come out of real knowledge and experi-
ence, enjoying the thing immensely, but giv-
ing no other sign than a sharper glint of
the eye, a slight opening of the lips. In a mo-
ment of crisis, being only human, he rises with
the rest of us, but deliberately, to follow the course
of a high fly down the foul line far toward the
bleachers. When the ball is caught he smiles and
sits down and folds his arms. I envy him his
capacity for drinking in enjoyment without dis-
play. This is the kind of Fan I should like to be.

IV

Does my thin-lipped friend in blue serge read
the sporting page.? I wonder. My own opinion
is that he does not, except to glance through the
box-score. It is for the other man, I imagine, the
stout young man behind me who detected from
the first ball thrown that the pitcher's arm was
no good, and who later identified him as the best
southpaw in the two leagues, that the sporting

THE GAME 89

page with its humor, its philosophy, its art, and
its poetry, is edited. The sporting page has long
ceased to be a mere chronicle of sport and has
become an encyclopaedia, an anthology, a five-foot
book-shelf, a little university in itself. The life
mirrored in the pictures on the sporting page is
not restricted to the prize-ring and the diamond,
though the language of the prize-ring and the
baseball field is its vernacular. The art of the
sporting page has expanded beyond the narrow
field of play to life itself, viewed as play.

The line of development is plain: from pictures
of the Fan at the game the advance has been to
pictures of the Fan at home, and so on to his
wife and his young, and his Weltanschauung, until
now the artist frequently casts aside all pretense
of painting sport and draws pictures of humanity.
The sporting cartoon has become a social
chronicle. It is still found on the sporting page ;
partly, I suppose, because it originated there,
partly because there is no other place in the paper
where it can get so wide an audience. It entraps
the man in the street who comes to read base-
ball and remains to study contemporary life —
in violent, exaggerated form, but life none the
less.

Even poetry. Sporting columns to-day run

90 BELSHAZZAR COUET

heavily to verse. Here, as well as in the pictures,
there has been an evolution. From the mere
rhymed chronicle of what happened to Christy
Mathewson we have passed on to generalized re-
flections on life, expressed, of course, in terms of
the game. Kipling has been the great model. His
lilt and his " punch " are so admirably adapted
to the theme and the audience. How many thou-
sand parodies of " Danny Deever " and " The
Vampire " have the sporting editors printed? I
should hesitate to say. But Kipling and his
younger imitators, with Henley's " Invictus " and
"When I was a King in Babylon," and the late
Langdon Smith's " Evolution " : " When I was a
Tadpole and You were a Fish " — ^have become the
patterns for a vast popular poetry which deals in
the main with the red-blooded virtues, — grit, good
humor, and clean hitting, — ^but which drops with
surprising frequency for an optimist race into
the mood of Ecclesiastes : —

Demon of Slow and of Fast Ones,
Monarch of Moisture and Smoke,
Who made Wagner swing at Anyoldthing,
And Baker look like a Joke.

And the writer goes on to remind the former
king of the boxmen that sooner or later " Old

THE GAME 91

Pop " Tempus asks for waivers on the best of us,
and that Matty and Johnson must in due time
make way for

Youngsters with pep from the Texas Steppe —
The Minors wait for us all.

Yes, you prince of batsmen, who amidst the
bleachers' roar,

Strolled to the plate with your T. Cobb gait.
Hitting .364 —

alas. Old Pop Tempus has had his way with you,
too: —

Your Average now is Rancid

And the Pellet you used to maul

In Nineteen O Two has the Sign on you —

The Minors wait for us all.

Not that it matters, of course. The point is to
keep on smiling and unafraid in Bushville as un-
der the Main Tent, always doing one's best.

To swing at the Pill with right good will.
Hitting .164.

This is evidently something more than a sport-
ing page. This is a cosmology.

92 BELSHAZZAR COURT

Will those gentlemen who are in the habit of
sneering at professional baseball kindly explain
why it is precisely the professional game which
has inspired the newspaper poets? Personally I
like professional baseball, and for the very rea-
sons why so many persons profess to dislike it.
The game is played for money by men who play
aU the time. They would rather win than lose,
but they are not devoured by the passion for vic-
tory. They will play with equal zest for Chicago
to-day and for Boston to-morrow. But when you
say all this you are really asserting what I have
discovered to be a fact, — ^unless Mr. G. K. Ches-
terton has discovered it before me, — that only in
professional sport does the true amateur spirit
survive.

By the amateur spirit I mean the spirit which
places the game above the victory; which takes
joy, though it may be a subdued joy, in the per-
fect coordination of mind and muscle and nerve;
which plays to win because victory is the best
available test of ability, but which is all the time
aware that life has other interests than the stand-
ing of the clubs and the Golf Committee's official
handicap. I contend that the man who plays to

THE GAME 93

live is a better amateur than the man who lives to
play. I am not thinking now of the actual amount
of time one gives to the game, though even then
it might be shown that Mr. Walter J. Travis de-
votes more hours to golf than Mr. Mathewson
devotes to baseball. I am thinking rather of the
adjustment of the game to the general scheme of
life. It seems to be pretty well established that
when your ordinary amateur takes up golf he
deteriorates as a citizen, a husband and father;
but I cannot imagine Mr. Walter Johnson neg-
lecting his family in his passion for baseball. As
between the two, where do you find the true
amateur spirit?

I insist. Professional baseball lacks the pic-
turesque and stimulating accessories of an inter-
collegiate game — ^the age-old rivalries, the mus-
tering of the classes, the colors, the pretty
women, the cheering carried on by young leaders
to the verge of apoplexy. But after all, why this
Saturnalia of pumped-up emotion over the win-
ning of a game? The winning, it will be ob-
served, and not the playing. Compared with
such an exhibition of the lust for victory, a pro-
fessional game, with its emphasis on the perform-
ance and not on the result, comes much nearer to
the true heart of the play instinct. An old topic

94 BELSHAZZAR COURT

this, and a perilous one. Before I know it I shall
be advocating the obsolete standards of English
sport, which would naturally appeal to a duffer.
Well, I will take the consequences and boldly as-
sert that there is such a thing as playing too
keenly, — even when playing with perfect fairness,
— such a thing as bucking the line too hard.

It is distortion of life values. After all, there
are things worth breaking your heart to achieve
and others that are not worth while. Francis
Ouimet's victory over Vardon and Ray is some-
thing we are justly proud of; not so much as a
display of golf, but as a display of our unrivaled
capacity for rallying all the forces of one's being
to the needs of the moment; for its display of
that grit and nerve on which our civilization has
been built so largely. Only observe, Ouimet's
victory was magnificent, but it was not play. It
was fought in the fierce spirit of the struggle for
existence which it is the purpose of play to make
us forget. It was Homeric, but who wants base-
ball or tennis or golf to be Homeric? Herbert
Spencer was not merely petulant when he said
that to play billiards perfectly argued a misspent
life. He stated a profound truth. To play as
Ouimet did against Vardon and Ray argues a
distortion of the values of life. What shall it

THE GAME 95

profit us if we win games and lose our sense of
the proportion of things? It is immoral.

I think Maurice McLoughlin's hurricane serv-
ice is immoral. I confess that when McLoughlin
soars up from the base line like a combination
Mercury and Thor, and pours the entire strength
of his lithe, magnificent body through the racket
into the ball, it is as beautiful a sight as any of
the Greek sculptors have left us. But I cannot
share the crowd's delight when McLoughlin's op-
ponent stands helpless before that hurtling, twist-
ing missile of fate. What satisfaction is there in
developing a tennis service which nobody can re-
turn? The natural advantage which the rules of
the game confer on the server ceases to be an
advantage and becomes merely a triumph of ma-
chinery, even if it is human machinery. A game
of tennis which is won on aces is opposed to the
very spirit of play. As a matter of fact, the
crowd admits this when it applauds a sharp rally
over the net, for then it is rejoicing in play,
whereas applause for an ace is simply joy in win-
ning. I repeat: McLoughlin making one of his
magnificent kills on the return is play ; McLough-
lin shooting his unretumable service from the back
line is merely a scientific engineer — and nothing
is more immoral than scientific management, es-

96 BELSHAZZAR COURT

pecially when applied to anything really worth
while in life. Incidentally, a change in the rules
of tennis seems unavoidable. The ball, instead
of being handed over to McLoughHn for sure de-
struction, will have to be thrown into the court by
the umpire, as in polo.

VI

You will now see why I am so much drawn to
the slender young man in blue serge who sits with
folded arms and only smiles when Mr. Doyle is
caught napping on first. It is because I am con-
vinced that he sees the game as it ought to be seen,
— ^with an intense sympathy and understanding,
but, after all, with a sense of humor which recog-
nizes that a great world lies outside the Polo
Grounds. You would not think that such a world
existed from the way in which the stout young
man behind me has been carrying on. It will be
recalled that he began by instantly discovering
that the visiting pitcher's arm was no good. This
discovery he had modified by the end of the fourth
inning to the extent that the visiting pitcher now
had everything. At the beginning of the ninth
iiming this revised opinion still held good. The
score was £ to against the home team, and the

THE GAME 97

stout young man got up in disgust, remarking
that he had no use for a bunch of cripples who
presumed to go up against a real team.

But he did not go home. He hovered in the
aisle, and when the home team, in the second half
of the ninth, bunched four hits and won the game,
the stout young man hurled himself down the
aisle and out upon the field, shrieking madly.
But the thin young man in blue serge got to his
feet, smiled, made some observation to his neigh-
bor in an undertone, which I failed to catch, and
walked away.

NIGHT LITE

The sun heaves up from its sleeping-place
somewhere in the vicinity of Flatbush, an ex-
tremely early riser, like most suburban residents,
and loses no time in setting out upward and west-
ward to its place of business over Manhattan.
But the sun is not the first comer there. Its
earliest rays surprise an army at work.
Creatures of the night, they cower and dissolve in
the oncoming of the light. The yellow glare of
their oil torches and the ghastly violet-blue of
their vacuum tubes pale, flicker, and go out be-
fore the onrush of dawn. It is amazing how a
great city can snore with equanimity while entire
regiments and squadrons carry on operations in
the streets, quietly but with no attempt at con-
cealment, under the very eyes of the police with
whom, in fact, they seem to have a complete un-
derstanding. No political revolutions in the name
of good citizenship, no shifting of Commission-
ers and Inspectors and Captains, can conceivably

98

NIGHT LIFE 99

destroy the entente cordiale between the police
and these workers in the dark. If anything, the
patrolman will stop in his rounds to watch their
maneuvers with an eye of amicable appraisal, and
when they begin to scatter with the dawn from
their places of congregation he speeds them on
their way with a word of cheer.

And the great city sleeps, its pulse scarcely dis-
turbed by the feverish activity of the army of
darkness. Or if the city catches a rumble of their
movements and stirs in its slumber, it is only to
turn over and go to sleep again. No hypnotic
spell will account for this indifference of a city of
five millions to the presence of an army in its gas-
lit streets. It is merely habit. If here and there
in the cubical hives where New York takes its rest
an unquiet sleeper tosses in his bed and resents the
disturbance, it is not to wish that these prowlers
of the night were caught and sent to jail, but
only to wish that they went about their business
more discreetly — this great host of marketmen,
grocers, butchers, milkmen, push-cart engineers,
and news vendors who have been engaged since
soon after midnight in the enormous task of pre-
paring the city's breakfast.

For this, of course, is the real night life of New
York — ^the life that beats at rapid pace in the

100 BELSHAZZAR COURT

great water-front markets, in the newspaper
press-rooms around Brooklyn Bridge, under the
acetylene glare over excavations for the new
Subways, and in the thousand bakery shops that
line the avenues and streets. This is the Under-
world of which we speak so little because it is a
real underworld. It is not made up of subter-
ranean galleries and shafts inhabited by a race
engaged in undermining the upper world. It is
a true Underworld on which the upper world of
the daylight hours is grounded. The foundations
of society run down into the night where the city's
food, the city's ways of communication, and the
city's news are being made ready and garnished
for the full roar of the day's life. Compared
with these workers of the dark the operations
of the housebreaker and his sister of the shadowy
sidewalks sink into insignificance. It is but a turn
of the hand for the army of the laborious Under-
world to undo the mischief which the outlaws of
the night have performed. Between one and five
in the morning they create ten thousand times the
wealth which it is in the power of the jail-bird to
destroy.

The point fascinates me. We need urgently a
vindication of the night, and especially of night
in the city. Occasionally, it is true, we pay lip

NIGHT LIFE 101

service to Night as the kindly nurse that brings
rest to the fevered brow and forgetfulness to the
uneasy conscience. But at heart we think of the
things of night as of things of evil. It would pay
to set to work a commission of moralists, economic
experts and statisticians, at striking a balance be-
tween the good and evil that are done in the night
and the day. Personally I have no doubt at all
as to which way the figures would point. It is
only a question of how far the day is behind the
night in its net contribution to the welfare of
humanity. Against night in Greater New York
you would have to debit, say, half a hundred
burglaries and highway assaults, a handful of
fires, a handful of joy-ride fatalities, much
gambling and debauchery, and possibly some of
the latest plays on Broadway. But from the
monetary point of view the wastage and pilfer-
ings of the night are a trifle compared to what an
active quarter of an hour may show in Wall
Street after ten in the morning. And as for the
moral laxities of the dark it depends on what you
call immorality. Greater harm to the fiber of
the race may be wrought during the day by the
intrigues of unscrupulous business, by factory
fire-traps, by sweat-shops, by the manipulators of
our political democracy, than by all the gambling

102 BELSHAZZAR COURT

houses and dives in the Tenderloin. After all, the
railroad-wrecking financiers, the get-rich-quick
promoters, the builders of jerry tenements, the
bank looters, bosses, and ward heelers suspend
their labors at night.

No ; the more you think of it the more you will
be persuaded that night is primarily the time of
the innocent industries, and for the most part
the primitive industries, employing simple, inno-
cent, primitive men — slow-speaking truck farmers,
husky red-faced slaughterers in the abattoirs,
solid German bakers, and milkmen. The milkman
alone is enough to redeem the night from its un-
deserved evil reputation. A cartload of pasteur-
ized milk for nurslings at four o'clock in the
morning represents more service to civilization
than a cartful of bullion on its way from the Sub-
treasury to the vaults of a national bank five hours
later.

I am, of course, not thinking now of the
early part of the night on Broadway, which is
only the bedraggled fringe of day, but of the later
half of night which is the fresh anticipation of
the dawn. In the still coolness before daybreak
the interests of the city come down to human es-
sentials. The commodities dealt in are those that
men bought and sold tens of thousands of years

NIGHT LIFE 103

before they trafficked in safety-razors and Bra-
zilian diamonds. The dealers of the night are
concerned with bread, flesh, milk, butter, cheese,
fruits, and the green offerings of the fields. Con-
tact with these things cannot but keep the soul
clean. There is a fortune for the nerve specialist
who will first advise his patients to rise at
three in the morning and walk a mile between the
rows of wagons and stalls in Gansevoort or
Wallabout Market and draw strength from the
piles of sweet green produce dewy under the lamp-
light, and learn patience from the farmer's horsesj
and observe that even men in their chafferings
can be subdued to the innocent medium in which
they traffic.

To be sure there are the newspaper men. I
have always assumed that it is primarily for them
the churches in the lower part of the city offer
special services for night-workers. If any class
of night-workers stands in need of prayer it must
be the men of my own profession, surely the least
innocent of all legitimate trades that are plied
after midnight. But as I think of it, even among
newspaper men it is the comparatively unspoiled
and innocent who work after midnight, members
of the lobster squad left on emergency duty, cubs
who have not lost all the freshness of the little

104 BELSHAZZAR COURT

towns in the Middle West and the South, the men
on the linotype machines, the men sweating in
the press-rooms, and the short, squat unshaven
men who stagger under enormous bundles of
newspapers to the cars and the elevated trains.
Here, too, night has exercised its cleansing selec-
tive effect. The big men of the press, the shrewd
manipulators of newspaper policy, the editorial
pleaders of doubtful causes, the city editors with
insistence on the " punch " as against the fact,
the Titans of the advertising columns, have all
gone home before midnight. As I think of it, the
only unrespectable members of the newspaper pro-
fession that work at 2 a.m. are the writers of
the Extra Special afternoon editions for the next
day. Let us hope that they take advantage of
the churches' standing offer of special services
and prayer for night-workers.

When you stroll through the markets, between
rows of wagons, stalls, crates, baskets, and squads
of perspiring men, you need not force the imagi-
nation to call up the solid square miles of brick
and stone barracks in which New York's five
million, minus some thousands, are asleep, out-
side the glare of the arc lights and kerosene
torches. You can tell Hercules from his foot and
you can tell New York from the size of its maw.

NIGHT LIFE 105

of which a single day's filling keeps these thou-
sands of men at work. There it sleeps, the big,
dark brute, and in another three hours it
will yawn and sit up and blink its eyes and roar
for its food. The markets are only the spots of
highest activity in the business of providing fod-
der for the creature. Turn out of the crush of
Gansevoort Market and walk south through
Washington Street and Greenwich Street and
Hudson Street, a good mile and a half south
through silent warehouses all crammed with food,
a solid square mile of provender. The contents
of these grim weather-beaten storehouses are
open to appraisal by the mere sense of smell as
you pass through successive strata of coffee, and
sugar, and tea, and spices, and green vegetables,
and fruits. If you are sufficiently educated you
may detect the individual species within the genus,
discern where the pepper merges into cloves, and
; the heavy odor of banana into the acid aroma
of the citrus. It seems almost indecent, this vast
debauch of gluttony, this great area given up
to the most elemental of the appetites, this Ten-
derloin of the stomach, until you once more recall
the five million individual cells of the animal that
will soon have to be fed.

The markets and the warehouses are not the

106 BELSHAZZAR COURT

belly of the city, as Zola has called them in his
own Paris. The digestive processes of a great
city are worked out later and in a million homes.
The markets are the heart of the city, pumping
the life-fuel to themselves from across the rivers
and the seas, and pumping them out again by
drayloads and cartloads through the avenues and
streets. In the late afternoon of the day before,
everywhere on the circumference of the city, you
have come across the driblets and streamlets of
nourishment which the markets suck to them-
selves. In Jersey, in Long Island, and in West-
chester you encounter, toward nightfall, heavy
farm-wagons of exactly the prairie-schooner type
that you first met in the school histories, plodding
on toward the ferries and the bridges, the drivers
nodding over the reins, the horses philosoph-
ically conscious of the long hours as well as the
long mUes ahead of them. Taken one by one,
these farmer's wagons moving at two miles an
hour seem pitifully inadequate to the appetites
and imperious demands of a metropolis. But they
are only the unquestioning units in the great
mobilization of the army of food providers. Their
cubic contents and their rate of progress have
been accurately estimated by the Von Moltkes of
the provision markets. At the appointed time

NIGHT LIFE 107

they will drop into their appointed place, form-
ing by companies and squadrons into hollow
squares for the daily encounter with human-
ity's oldest and most indefatigable foe — ^hunger.

The markets on the water-front are the heart
of the city's night life, but in all the five boroughs
there are local centers of concentrated vitality —
the milk depots, the street-railway junctions, the
car bams. Where Elevated or Subway meets with
Crosstown and longitudinal surface lines you
will find at three in the morning as active and
garishly illuminated a civic center as many a city
of the hinterland would boast of at nine o'clock
in the evening. Groups of switchmen, car dis-
patchers, conductors, motormen, and the casual
onlooker whom New York supplies from its inex-
haustible womb even at three in the morning, stand
in the middle of the road and discuss the most
wonderful mysteries — so it seems at least in the
hush before dawn. And because the cars which
they switch and side track and dispatch on their
way depart empty of passengers and lose them-
selves in the shadows, their business, too, seems
one of impressive mystery.

A car conductor at three o'clock in the morn-
ing is the most delightful of people to meet. His
hands are not yet grimy with the filth of alien

108 BELSHAZZAR COURT

nickels and dimes. His temper is as yet unworn
with the day's traffic. In the beneficent cool of
the night his thwarted social instincts unfold. If
you share the rear platform with him, which you
will do as a rule, he will accept your fare with a
deprecating smile as money passes between gen-
tlemen who stoop to the painful necessity but take
no notice of it. Having registered your fare, he
will engage you in conversation, and it is amaz-
ing how the harassed soul of the car conductor is
open to the ideas and forces that rule the great
world. If you are timid with conductors and
take your way into the car after paying your
fare, he will make a pretense of business with the
motorman and, coming back, he will find a remark
to draw you out of your surliness or your timid-
ity. He may even sit down next to you and after
five minutes you will be cursing the mechanical
necessity of the daylight life which takes this
eminently human creature and turns him into a
bundle of rasping hurry and incivility. If a visit
to the markets is a good cure for neurosis, a trip
down Amsterdam Avenue in a surface car at three
A.M. is a splendid tonic for democracy.

And once more food. For the men who labor in
the night, primarily for the city's breakfast, must
themselves be fed. Clustered around the markets.

NIGHT LIFE 109

and around the railway junctions and car barns,
are the brilliantly illuminated Shanleys and Del-
monicos of the industrious Underworld. What
places of warm cheer they are, on a winter night,
these long rows of Lunches, whose names are a
perpetual lesson in the national geography —
Baltimore Lunch, Hartford Lunch, Washington
Lunch, New Orleans and Memphis and Utica and
Milwaukee Lunches. They all have tiled floors
and white walls and spacious arm-chairs with a
table extension like the chairs in which we used
to write examination papers at college. In the
rear of the room is the counter supporting the
great silver coiFee-um. The placards on the
walls reek with plenty. You wonder how the re-
sources of an establishment operating on an aver-
age level of fifteen cents the meal can supply the
promised bounty — sirloins and small steaks, and
shellfish out of season and all the delicacies of the
griddle and the casserole ; — only the prudent con-
sumer will concentrate on the coffee and dough-
nuts. The rarities are to be had, if you insist,
and who would quarrel with the quality of a sir-
loin steak selling for twenty cents with bread,
butter, and coffee, at three in the morning? But
it is better to ask for coflFee and doughnuts.
An affable humanism permeates the Baltimore

110 BELSHAZZAE COURT

Lunch. The proprietor, the chef, the waiter, and
the cashier will come forward to meet you and
exchange a word or two with you as he wipes up
the arm-table. He will take your order, and go-
ing behind the coimter, will deliver it to himself.
If you are extravagant and ask for meats, he will
disappear into some sort of cupboard, which is a
kitchen, and pleasant pungent odors will precede
his reappearance. He will punch your check as
a protection against malfeasance by the waiter
and he will ring up your payment on the cash-
register as a protection against malfeasance on
the part of the cashier. If your manners permit
he will come forward and watch you while you
eat, not with the affected paternal mien of the
head waiter at the Waldorf, but as a brother, a
democrat, and a chef who has presided over your
food from the first moment till the last and is
qualified to take an intimate interest in its ulti-
mate disposal. He is generous with the butter,
and as a rule he is indifferent to tips.

Can I do you justice, oh Baltimore Lunchman
of the Gay White Way in the vicinity of Broad-
way and Manhattan Streets, where the enormous
black iron span of the Subway viaduct casts its
shadow over all the cars that run west to Fort
Lee and north to Fort Greorge and south into the

NIGHT LIFE 111

deserted regions of lower Broadway? Your nap-
kins unquestionably were white once upon a time,
and your apron is but so-so, but your heart is in
the right place, and consequently your manners
are perfect. On you, too, the night has exercised
its cleansing effect, wiping out commercialism and
leaving behind the instinct for service. You ac-
cept my money, but only that you may have the
means to go on feeding the useful toilers of the
night and occasional castaways like myself. The
spirit of profit does not lurk under your flaring
arc lights ; where is the profit in sirloin steak with
bread, butter, and coffee at twenty cents? You
are not a trafficker in food, but a minister to
human needs, almost as disinterested as the dogs
of St. Bernard, of whom, if you don't mind my
saying so, you strongly remind me, with your
solid bulk and great shock of hair and the two
days' beard and your strangely unmanicured
fingers. You do not cater to the pampered palate
of the rich, which lusts for strange plants and
strange animals and strange liquids to devour.
Your sizzling coffee is nectar in the veins of big
men who run in on winter nights stamping their
feet and smiting their palms stiff from the icy
brake-handle and switching-lever — the simple, in-
nocent toilers of the night. Occasionally your

112 BELSHAZZAE COURT

walls resound to the gayety of young voices and
your arc lights glow on the shimmer of linen and
sUks which put your regular customers somewhat
out of countenance, as when a troop of young
men and girls after loitering wickedly at the dance
seek refuge with you while waiting for a car.
They taste your coffee and nibble at your dough-
nuts for a lark. So they say. It is pretense.
They do not nibble, they do not taste; they eat
and drink with undeniable rehsh the rough, im-
familiar fare. After five hours' exercise on the
dancing floor and a ten minutes' wait on a wintry
corner there is an electric spark in your coffee
and Titan's food in your doughnuts. Motormen,
draymen, young men and women in dancing
pumps, what a line of customers is yours ! Oh
Youth! Oh Night! Oh Baltimore Lunchman!

The gray of dawn overtakes the armies from the
markets, the car barns, and the excavation pits
in full retreat. They scatter in every direction,
weary, heavy-eyed, but with no sense of defeat in
their souls. They throng to the river to lose them-
selves in the mysterious wilds of Jersey. Their
cavalry and train rumble down empty Broadway to
South Ferry. They pour eastward toward the
bridges or hide themselves in the cellars and ram-
shackle comer booths of the East side. They

NIGHT LIFE 113

plunge into the Subway and, stretched out at full
length in the illuminated spaciousness of the In-
terborough's cars, they pass off into the sleep
which falls alike upon the just and the unjust,
contrary to general supposition. When the day
breaks it finds their haunting-places deserted or
given over to small brigades of sweepers and clean-
ers who make ready for the other kinds of busi-
ness that are carried on in the full glare of the
sun.

Blessed are the meek! While waiting for the
inheritance of the earth they are already in full
possession of the glory of the sunrise, which we
of the comfortable classes know only by hearsay.
The tremulous milky gray of the firmament fol-
lowed by the red flush of daylight is reserved in
New York for the truck farmer from the suburbs,
the drayman, the food vendors, and the early fac-
tory hands. For them only is the beauty of New
York as it heaves up out of the shadows. The
farmer who has disposed of his wares with ex-
pedition and is now on his way back to the Jersey
shore, when he looks back, sees the jagged silhou-
ette of our towers and massed brick piles like a
host of negroid Titans plodding northward in re-
treat. Or if his way is by the Municipal boats to
Staten Island, he may look back and see a thin

114 BELSHAZZAR COURT

shaft of light, ethereal, tremulous, almost of
faery, and that pillar of light will be Broadway
canyon between its brick walls still clad in shadow.
It is given only to the foreign-bom ditchers and
hewers of the crowded lower Bronx, as they
trudge across the bridges over the Harlem, to see
before them mighty iron spans flung forward into
the shadows or to catch the mirrored sweep of
magic arches lifting up out of the water to link
themselves to the arch overhead.

The beauty of New York, rising to meet a new
day, is for these lowly workers, and for the unfor-
tunates who stay out in the night not to work,
but to sleep, because night and the open is their
only refuge. When the curtain of night rises on
Riverside and reveals Grant's Tomb in frosty
vagueness at the end of a green vista, the sight is
rarely for those who sleep in the expensive
caravansaries along the Drive, and most often for
the sleepers on the benches. It is the men who
sleep on the benches in Morningside Park that are
the first to wonder at the dark line of poplars
holding desperate defense against the charging
line of daylight, and over the poplars the huge,
squat octagon of St. John's buttressed chapels ; un-
less the sleepers on the benches are anticipated by
the angel atop of St. John's greeting the dawn

NIGHT LIFE 115

with his trumpet. Because night loiterers are
excluded from Central Park, I suppose that all its
awakening loveliness must go for naught. But
if the first impingement of the sun on the massed
verdure of the park, on its lakes, its Alpine views,
its waterfalls, and the fresh, sweet meadows, does
find a rare spectator, it must be again one of the
homeless who has eluded police regulations to find
a night's rest in the great green inclosure. Pos-
sibly there may be a poet or two wandering about
in Central Park at dawn, but the poets are early
risers only in the country. To them the city is
only the monstrous, noisy machine of the full day.
That on New York City, too, the sun rises in the
morning, working its miracles of beauty, seems
to have escaped the poets ; or else they have es-
caped me.

As the sun continues to mount from Flatbush
towards the East River bridges, the demoraliza-
tion of the hosts of night-workers grows complete.
Either they have disappeared or they straggle
on through isolated streets, mere units, like the
flotsam of a beaten army. The full light strips
them of their dignity. As late even as five
o'clock, the milkman in the quiet streets is a
symbol and a mystery. By six o'clock he is a
common purveyor. Contact with frowsy elevator

116 BELSHAZZAR COURT

boys and gaping grocer's clerks has vulgarized
him. His interests are no longer in food, but in
commerce. Instead of communing with the night,
he is busy with a memorandum book and a lead
pencil.

In the full dawn the acetylene flares over the
excavation pits have gone out. The dazzling arc
lights in the Baltimore and Hartford Lunches
are out. The street cars, running on shorter
schedules, have taken on their daylight screech
and clangor. The conductor is fast sinking into
daylight surliness. The huge bundles of news-
papers which at night and in bulk have the merit
of a really great commodity, the dignity almost
of a bag of meal or a crate of eggs, are now re-
solved into units on the stationers' stands, aUd
if the new day be Sunday the newsman is^ busy
sorting out the twelve different sections of the
Sunday paper and putting the comic section on
top. Nor can I think of anything in human af-
fairs which can be more futile in the eyes of a
Creator than a stationer sorting out comic sup-
plements in the full glory of early sunrise. With
its newspaper waiting for it, New York of the
ordinary life is ready to get out of bed.

VI
LAURELMERE IN PEACE AND WAR

Ten months in the year we sleep, eat, and re-
ceive our friends in Belshazzar Court. But if
home is where the heart is, our apartment stands
vacant seven months of the twelve. With the
first thrill of the March sunlight come dreams of
the sea, green fields, the hills, and by the first
week in April we are planning vacations. The
spring rains sap and mine at the foundations of
Belshazzar Court's superheated comfort. Like
every one of the fifty-three other families who
have been snuggling together against the winter,
we feel less need of our neighbors as the days
grow warmer and we yield to the gentle Welt-
schmerz which seeks expression in real estate
catalogues. The hallways in Belshazzar Court
grow stuffy, the bedrooms shrink and darken,
and stray conversation from across the court no
longer wakens the response of human fellowship.

117

118 BELSHAZZAR COURT

In winter Belshazzar Court is an admirable two
minutes from the Subway, but in April I begin
to feel that a ten minutes' walk to the train in the
morning is just what my health requires. To get
away, away — Weltschmerz, Wanderlust, or any
other term of gentle, surging emotion the Kaiser's
language is so rich in. We go in for real estate
catalogues, time-tables, commutation fares, and the
local distribution of malaria and mosquitoes in
the northeastern United States.

We go away in July. We come back in Sep-
tember, but only in the body. It is another four
weeks before Belshazzar Court becomes home
again. The apartment shows traces of the paint-
ers and the paper-hangers. The family wardrobe
is in transit from trunks to closets. Emmeline
haunts the employment offices. Harold must be
fitted out for school. The bedroom distribution
problem must be settled and cannot be properly
settled until Harold's bed has been tried out in
every sleeping-room and brought back to its orig-
inal place. Not tiU some time in October does life
fall back into the compact, steam-heated ways of
Belshazzar Court. Not till then does the spirit
rejoin the body and take up its old habitation.
There ought to be such a thing as spiritual rent,
payable only during those months when our souls

LAURELMERE 119

are at peace in Belshazzar Court, Nobody then
would want to be a landlord and everyone would
be happy.

This summer we decided early against hotels
and boarding-houses. Emmeline's nerves are not
equipped for the strain of porch life. The chil-
dren find the noise rather trying. And the vast
amount of work which I plan for my summer va-
cation and which regularly gets postponed to
Christmas could not conceivably be carried on in
hotel writing-rooms. We decided then that this
summer it must be a place of our own in the
country, though we would take our meals outside.
It must be within commuting distance. When I
must go back to the office I could still come out
every night and so spare the children, who have
grown used to having me all the time, the sharp
pang of separation which they always experience
on such occasions until I turn the corner. A
place of our own at the shore, with trees and grass,
with a porch, with first-class train service, and
costing much less than a hotel would — that is all
we asked.

At Laurelmere-by-the-Sea we found everything
we wanted — except the scale of expenditure,
which naturally cannot be ascertained until ac-
counts are checked up at the end of the summer.

120 BELSHAZZAR COURT

And we found it almost at the first venture. From
the street the house looked but so-so. But at the
back of the house, one flight up, there was a
porch as large as our big bedroom in Belshazzar
Court, screened from all observation by lattice-
work, by thick matted vines, and a willow-tree,
which stood sentinel guard right in the middle
and brushed its lower branches against the porch
railing. The porch looked down on a garden with
hedges and over the trees there was a blue line on
the horizon edged with white lace, which was the
sea. As we stood there on the porch, and the
renting agent was presumably wondering how
much he could ask, there slid over the blue line of
the sea a boat with white sails, with the rigid,
swanlike motion of a stage boat propelled by a
gang of expert scene shifters. I don't know
whether the renting agent had a signal system by
which a magic boat with white sails could be made
to glide by just as a prospective tenant stepped
out on the back porch. There was nothing more
to be said. We rented the porch with its acces~
sory rooms, and two weeks later we were in resi-
dence at Laurelmere. It remained only to hire
a bathhouse, a beach chair, and a yellow umbrella.
Our vacation — and simultaneously my own vaca-
tion from the office — ^began with a swing.

LAURELMERE 121

It is not my intention to give a formal account
of our experience by the sea. For that matter
any academic picture of a summer outing must be
a failure. Fugitive impressions are best. I set
down the following disjointed notes just as they
were put to paper, with no attempt at system and
elaboration : —

Jtdy 14-.

Yesterday I tipped the bathhouse attendant
and this morning I found a new man on our aisle.
Last Saturday we tipped the grocer's boy and
the afternoon of the same day he resigned. Last
week I gave the waitress at the hotel a handsome
fee to insure for ourselves the favored-nation
treatment for an indefinite future, and the very
next day Harold developed mumps and we have
been taking our meals at home. On the subject
of tips Emmeline disagrees with MachiavelH, who
says that men are actuated by the expectation
of favors to come rather than by gratitude for
favors in the past. Emmeline says always tip in
advance; but the facts are against her.

My experience with waiters, janitors, and bath-
house attendants has always been the same. Why
do they resign after a generous gratuity.'' It
cannot be that they take it as an insult. Some-

122 BELSHAZZAR COURT

times I have suspected that they resign in order
to give someone else a chance at me. Or else my
tip just rounds out the amount of capital on
which they can afford to retire or go into busi-
ness for themselves. Perhaps, again, it is only
the Wanderlust which is so strong in the servitor
class. The man at the bathing pavilion is still in
business three aisles further on, and the grocer's
boy is working for another grocer half a block
away. It would be an interesting experiment to
follow up a grocer's boy or a janitor who resigns
after being tipped. We could transfer our mar-
keting or our living-quarters to the place of his
new employment, and so doggedly pursue him
with tips until he turned upon us in desperation,
declaring millions for defense, but not a cent for
tribute. At any rate, here is a suggestion I throw
out for the psychologists. Whenever you en-
counter a problem that is too difficult or of no
particular importance, throw it out as a sugges-
tion for someone else to work out.

July 16.
The theatrical season here is in full blast. Our
taste runs strongly to the educational drama. At
the Bijou we have Dolly Devereux and her Red-
head Aeroplane Girls. At the Twentieth Cen-

LAURELMERE 12S

tury we have a white-slave film in four reels, with
a condensed version in two reels at the half-price
afternoon performances for children. Our stock
company is drawing crowded houses to The Lure,
which the dramatic reviewer on the local weekly
^as aptly characterized as the most soul-racking
drama ever written for the purposes of a refined
evening's entertainment. There is obviously no
reason why people spending their holidays on this
unequaled section of the Atlantic Coast should be
allowed to forget the grimmer aspects of life. As
the reviewer for the local paper cleverly remarks,
the sense of human fellowship is as strong on Long
Island as in the White Mountains or the Maine
woods. On this point it is instructive to listen to
comments from the audience as it leaves the
theater after a performance of this pioneer edu-
cational drama of the Underworld:

" It was chilly, but once you got into the water
it was awfully warm. The sea, you know, is al-
ways warmer than the air."

" Isn't it terrible that such things should be
allowed? "

" I prefer a voile ; it doesn't wrinkle."

The Wednesday matinees are well attended. As
the dramatic reviewer for our paper observes,
after a performance of The Lure, the visitor wiU

124 BELSHAZZAR COURT

find a dip in the sea a delightful way of rounding
out the afternoon and preparing for dinner.

Juiy 17.

Now that Huerta is out we are chiefly inter-
ested in how to pronounce " maxixe." I rep-
resent the conservative wing which pronounces it
" macksikes," my attitude on all such questions
having been determined years ago when I learned
from Professor Woodberry to speak of the melan-
choly Jayqueeze and the Seven Ages of Man.
The moderates of the Center pronounce it
"macheeche." The adherents of the Extreme
Left pronounce it anywhere from " machoochee "
to " maxeexeh," the " eh " in the latter form
representing the suspended and prolonged catch
of the breath with which French tragediennes pro-
nounce all final e's, a method in vogue with grad-
uates of the Misses Ely's school of Stratford atte
Bowe. We have several Theatres of Danse, one
Garden of Danse, and many minor Galeries and
Trianons of Danse, at all of which there is danc-
ing afternoons and evenings.

In the drug stores there are stamp machines
which sell four penny stamps for a nickel. I
don't know who makes the profit, the Government,
the patentee of the machine, or the storekeeper.

LAURELMEEE 125

But a superprofit of twenty-five per cent, strikes
me as exorbitant. Doesn't this reveal the secret
of the high cost of living? Say that the average
young woman on her vacation sends out fifty pic-
ture postcards a day; that represents an excess
charge of twelve and a half cents a day, or one
dollar and seventy-five cents during the fortnight.
This considerable saving could be effected by
buying stamps in large quantities at the post
office, say in sheets of one hundred. All one has
to do then, when a postcard is to be mailed, is to
turn out every drawer in one's room and sundry
pockets. With some care the stamps can be glued
apart and they are practically as good as new.

July 19.
Harold has not been bathing as yet on account
of the rain and the mumps. While his face was
still badly swollen he prayed to be allowed to go
swimming in the rain, but was persuaded not to.
He contented himself with describing the prodig-
ious feats he would accomplish in the surf,
though I extracted from him the promise that he
would not venture beyond the lifelines. Since the
swelling on his cheek has subsided and the warm
weather has come in Harold has been reticent on
the subject of the water and prefers to play tennis

126 BELSHAZZAR COURT

in the back garden. Once or twice he has asked
whether it is essential to get one's hair wet when
bathing.

Jvly W.

The number of young men this summer is be-
low the ordinary level. A fair estimate of the
crop would be 2.3 per cent, as against an average
of 4.5 per cent, for the preceding ten years ; this
not only in spite of but because of the heavy
rains. Where the young men appear they are im-
mediately taken up. Two young men arrived at
the hotel across the street, one morning about
ten. At 12.15 they were carrying sand cushions
and wraps for two extremely attractive school
teachers from Brooklyn. I don't know whether
the scarcity of young men is due to the prevailing
economic depression or whether it is the familiar
phenomenon bewailed by young women at the
shore that young men this year go to the moun-
tains, and by young women in the mountains that
young men go to the shore. This does not explain
everything, as it would apparently leave the young
men in a condition like Mohammed's coffin sus-
pended between the mountains and the sea.

One result of the scarcity of young men is a
corresponding increase in the hauteur of the life-

LAURELMERE 127

guards. Whereas in ordinary years one of these
semi-nude Apollos will pose an average of ten
minutes with folded arms and corrugated brows
bent upon the sea, this year by actual timing they
will pose twenty minutes at a stretch.

July 23.
In a reclining arm-chair under a large umbrella
at the edge of the sea, Bernard Shaw's last volume
of plays is ideal. When you pick up Misalliance,
with a preface on " Parents and Children," and
look across to where the outer bar is just covered
with a filmy lacework of foam, you realize for the
first time that summer reading is not a question
of heavy books or light books, but whether the
pages are cut (y^ not. For a man in the very front
rank of advanced thought Bernard Shaw reveals
one striking reactionary trait: his books cannot
be read without a paper-cutter. Yet even in his
old-fashioned survivals Shaw is himself. The
pages of Misalliance are not pasted at the top,
or at the top and side, as they used to be in Vic-
torian days, but exclusively at the bottom. To a
true Shavian there may be an inner meaning in
this peculiarity of the binder's art. A true
Shavian will not grudge the extra effort of slicing
open the pages, even if one has to borrow a child's

128 BELSHAZZAR COURT

sand spade for the purpose. But one who is not
completely of the faith sometimes shrinks from
the task.

Especially if he looks up and finds the outer
bar completely submerged and the waves lapping
nearer on the sands. There is no breeze. There
is no swell in the channel between the main shore
and the reef, and diminutive sailing craft with
lowered canvas glide by under motor power. An
army under yellow and green umbrellas is en-
camped on the sands. Regiments of engineers
ranging in age from three to seven are throwing
up elaborate fortifications and planting the na-
tional banner on the escarpment. Regiments of
sappers and miners drive tunnels under these for-
tifications and are frequently buried under the
ruins. The younger engineers, say from three to
five, have a curious habit of neglecting the mate-
rial on the spot and fetching their sand from a
distance of twenty feet between their fingers. I
don't know why, but they make one think of Shaw.
You pick up the volume on your knee.

And then it occurs to you that in order to do
justice to Misalliance, is it absolutely necessary
to cut the pages.'' For one thing you may hold
the uncut pages apart at the top with two fingers
and peer down. It is rather a strain on the eyes,

LAUEELMERE 129

but it can be done. I have done it several times,
and it struck me that it may have all been inten-
tional on Shaw's part. With superb confidence
he set himself to testing the devotion of his ad-
mirers, and his own power to interest. In that
drowsy air, with the warm sun on the sands and
the orchestral murmur of the incoming waters,
what other writer of our day would dare impose
upon his readers the alternative of getting out
of the chair and borrowing a shovel, or holding
the pages apart with two fingers and peering
down? The latter process is difficult. Halfway
down the page you are buried, eyes, nose, and
chin, between the pages, and the lines toward the
bottom of the page necessitate a combined down-
ward and side thrust of the head which is both un-
assthetic and bad for the muscles of the neck. The
gray-blue of the water, the sunlight shimmering
through the yellow umbrella covering, the great
peace of the shore, come home to you with pecu-
liar force after you have extracted your face from
between the pages of Misalliance, and let your
neck sway back to the perpendicular.

But why peep? Bernard Shaw's supreme quali-
fication for summer reading lies precisely in the
fact that it is neither necessary to cut his pages
nor peer between them. Sometimes I do neither,

130 BELSHAZZAR COURT

and I find that I have grasped Shaw's message as
clearly in this book as I have done in any of his
books with a paper-knife at hand. His wit, his
paradox, his sudden and brilliant generalization,
carry me over the gulf of a couple of untouched
pages without the least sense of traveling through
empty space. There can be no feeling of jar in
passing from page 29 to page 32 in Shaw's dia-
logue, because the person who is speaking at the
bottom of page 29 and the person who is speaking
at the top of page S2 have no perceptible human
diiference. Actually I can recall that some of
the most illuminating truths in Bernard Shaw have
come to me just in this way — ^by turning un-
knowingly from page 29 to page 32.

Clouds are masking the sun and turning the
gray-blue of the water into steel gray and dull
lead. A breeze has sprung up and it frets the
surface of the channel. Diminutive catboats
throw up sail and glide by no longer on an even
keel. Engineers, sappers, and miners are being
huddled into baby carts and dragged off protest-
ing to lunch. The life-guard, gray woolen
sweater and brown slim legs, looks more than ever
the Superman. Here's the book again.

It must be the secret of the entire contem-
porary school of paradox, of whimsy, of individ-

LAURELMERE 131

ualistic standards in literature, that it appeals to
a time-saving age by creating books that can be
read without cutting the pages. For instance,
when the book reviewer says of a book that it con-
tradicts itself, but so does life contradict itself;
that the author does not prove his point, but
Nature never bothers about demonstrating any-
thing ; that his grammar is a bit rough, but so was
Shakespeare's — ^when a reviewer says all this of
an author it is obvious that this author can afford
to have his pages pasted in couples or in fours.
He will be just as consecutive as ever. Such an
author may be read the way old textbooks were
intended to be read, with the big type for every-
one, with footnotes in smaller type for the closer
student, with appendices for the specialist. For
the extremely frivolous reader, Bernard Shaw
might come pasted eight pages together; for the
more serious reader like myself, two together, and
so on.

The idea fascinates me. I imagine myself be-
ginning a new play of Shaw's by reading every
eighth page, and returning for a closer grapple
with his meaning on every fourth page, and so on
till all the pages were cut. I imagine myself writ-
ing a little essay in appreciation of Fanny's First
Play based on this kind of research. I call up a

132 BELSHAZZAR COURT

picture of the Shaw of pages 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc,, a
fierce, mocking, biting spirit at war with the world
as it is to-day, and then I compare it with the
Shaw of pages 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc., a shrewd,
practical student of human nature, keenly aware
of its limitations, and generous to our human
frailties. The .combinations are infinite. One
can always compare the Shaw of pages 1, 3, 4, 7,
8, 9, 12, 16, with the Shaw of pages 2, 3, 4, 6, 9,
13, 14, 15. By refusing to make use of a paper-
cutter I could wring out the very heart of Shaw's
secret here in this chair by the edge of the sea.

My vacation from the office was a success. It
would have been a complete success if Harold had
not brought the germ of mumps with him from
the city and passed it on to the baby. After that
we had peace, such perfect peace that I longed for
the time when I must get back to the city. It
seemed unmanly, it seemed abominably anti-social
to be lounging there, a big man in full possession
of his strength, between the beach and the porch
hammock while fifty minutes away, in the city,
four million men and women were sweating to pile
up the wealth that kept me in idleness.

LAURELMERE 133

I came back to the office the day the Kaiser's
troops appeared before Liege. I do not imply any
connection between the two events. I am not
even trying to point out a coincidence. What I
mean is that henceforth the morning papers be-
came magic literature, and the fifty minutes' ride
from Laurelmere was hardly long enough. Thus
the war in Europe made easy my initiation as a
commuter. Coming into town and going out we
read war on the train or talked war. I began to
form habits. I made acquaintances. There were
the men who came in on the 7.57 and those who
came in on the 8.17. There were the men who
■went out on the 5.02 and those who went out on
the 5.40. Don't imagine that I am going to
draw any subtle psychological comparisons be-
tween the 7.57 type of man and the 8.17 type, or
between the 5.02 type and the 5.40 type. As a
matter of fact, the men who came in on the 8.17
were mostly men who had just missed the 7.57,
and so in the evening.

On all trains we talked war, — that is, after we
had exchanged notes on the temperature of the
water in the sea the night before. On the trains
I listen better than I talk, and often I was a poor
listener; but I would let my eyes rest on the quiet
bay, a marsh at low tide, a lovely inland sea at

134 BELSHAZZAR COURT

high, and my thoughts would wander away from
my companions, but not away from the war. The
tread of the Kaiser's battalions was heavy on my
soul.

One day it took Williams, who sometimes comes
out with me on the 5.02, exactly twenty-seven
minutes by the watch to destroy the German Em-
pire and reconstruct the map of Europe. We
were still in Flatbush Avenue when Williams began
an irresistible advance against the right wing of
the Kaiser's troops in Belgium. Before we reached
Nostrand Avenue he was pursuing the demoralized
German legions right off the top of the afternoon
newspaper on which he had drawn his field of
operations with a pencil which he borrowed from
me and failed to return. After that it was a sim-
ple matter for Williams to outflank the German
right wing in Alsace and hurl it back in confusion
off the right-hand edge of his newspaper in the
general direction of Berlin. The mortality was
appalling, but no humane considerations could be
allowed to stand in the way of Field Marshal Wil-
liams's resolve to swing a complete circle around
the German armies of the center and force them
to lay down their arms. This he accomplished
while we were held up in the tunnel this side of
East New York and the lights went out. The

LAURELMERE 135

incident did not interfere in the least with his
conduct of operations. Like a great commander
he seized upon opportunity and turned it to his
advantage. When the lights were switched on the
Allies had drawn an iron ring around the German
forces and were negotiating the terms of capitu-
lation. Williams had delivered his master stroke
under cover of the dark.

" It couldn't have been done without wireless,"
said Williams, and he passed on to his second
move.

But I was not listening. I was thinking of wire-
less. Not the witches' dance of Marconi, De
Forest, Telefunken, which broke loose in the
atmosphere over three oceans and several inland
seas from the moment that England took her
stand at Armageddon ; admiralty towers and flag-
ships snapping out commands ; timorous liners,
only the other day queens of the seas, now
whimpering to cruisers for help; cruisers flashing
curt reassurance; code, laden with the destiny of
nations, sharing the impartial air with obvious
newspaper lies from a dozen capitals; wireless
waves zigzagging from coast to coast, crossing,
colliding — an electric Walpurgis Night symboliz-
ing the Triumph of Science and Civilization — I
meant none of these.

136 BELSHAZZAR COURT

I was thinking of a much more rarefied wireless
than Marconi can contemplate — the clash and
confusion of the prayers of the nations, winging
their way through the ether to the Throne of
Grace, imploring divine assistance in the work of
murder for which they had girded themselves.
Prayers in German, prayers in English, prayers in
French and Latin, prayers in Russian, Old Sla-
vonian, Magyar, Serb, Flemish, Japanese — and
who knows at this time of writing? — sprayers in
Italian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Dutch, Scandi-
navian — ^the prayers of all the Great Powers
and the smaller powers storming up to One whom
in their sacred books they consent to call the
greatest power of all; calling for victory, which
is the code word for enemies slaughtered.

Only a divine intelligence could conceivably
keep its bearing in this hurly-burly of the S. O. S.
litanies of the peoples. Only a divine fortitude
could endure it. It is hard enough for the himian
father when a brood of hungry children clamor
for bread and there is no bread to give. But
what man was ever called upon to decide among a
pack of children clamoring for each other's de-
struction ?

I have set down what I remember of the main
outhnes of Williams's strategy. I have only the

LAURELMERE 187

vaguest recollections. Of the tactical details by
which he won the greatest victory recorded in the
history of the Long Island Railroad I do re-
member this much: whenever the Germans were
confronted by a river Williams compelled them to
throw pontoon bridges across it under the wither-
ing fire of the Allies and they perished by the
thousands. Whereas all the rivers that the Allies
were under the necessity of crossing shrank in
size and depth so as to be easily forded. If it
was a particularly large stream that stood in the
way of the advance of the victorious Allies, Wil-
liams looked thoughtful for a moment and then
erased it with the rubber on my pencil. The Ger-
man airships were of no avail. Without the least
compunction Williams flung a couple of French
aeroplanes against the Kaiser's Zeppelins and the
proud battleships of the empyrean blew up.
Sometimes the French aviator was carried along
to destruction, but most often he volplaned to the
ground within his own lines. The German re-
sistance crumpled up before the Allies because
the Kaiser's troops were all Socialists and fre-
quently refused to obey their officers. Neverthe-
less the great enveloping movement of the Allies
might have failed after all if the heart had not
been taken out of the German Army by an attack

138 BELSHAZZAR COURT

from the rear executed by a powerful British
fleet which Admiral Williams sent up the Rhine.
This last move, I believe, was a sudden inspiration
which came to Williams as we were crossing the
trestle over Jamaica Bay and he looked out of
the window and saw fishermen in flatboats dozing
over their lines. The same sight flung my
thoughts far from Williams for the moment.

It occurred to me that the disadvantages of
believing in one single ruler of the universe must
be painfully present to the war lords and the
cabinet ministers and the bishops, archbishops and
patriarchs when they prepare to go to war. In
Parliament and before their congregations they
maintain, of course, that Providence is on their
side. But in their heart of hearts they must
sometimes have their doubts. They must wonder if
the Power whom they claim as an Ally may not
turn out to be only a Judge. For the purposes
of war, paganism has an enormous advantage
over belief in one God. What a nation needs
when it is preparing to kill more of its neighbors
than its neighbors can kill of its own citizens is a
tribal god upon whom it can count for undivided
attention and sympathy. Berlin could then ad-
dress its petitions to Moloch, Paris to Beelzebub,
London to Dagon or Neptune, Rome to Ashtoreth,

LAURELMERE 139

with utter confidence and with no danger of con-
fusion.

For obviously there must be confusion when
many nations, professing the same creed, are com-
pelled to use very much the same formulas of
prayer, inserting only the respective name of the
country and its ruler. A private tribal god upon
whose exclusive services the war leaders might
count, a private book of prayer embodying the
really important facts to be brought to the at-
tention of the tribal god — that is the ideal to
which the nations of Europe in arms ought to
strive.

Decidedly that is the idea. No general forms
of prayer, but England, submitting its case to
Dagon, would use its own litany, the Chief Priest
of Oxbury intoning:

" Iron Duke — 25,000 tons — ten 13.5-inch guns
— 22 knots.

"Warspite — 27,500 tons — eight 15-inch guns
— 25 knots.

"Valiant — 27,500 tons — eight 15-inch guns —
25 knots.

"Audacious — 23,000 tons — ten 13.5-inch guns
— ^21 knots.

" Thunderer — 22,500 tons — ^ten 13.5-inch guns
—20.8 knots."

140 BELSHAZZAR COURT

And the choir might declaim the supplementary
exhortations — ^the smaller battleships, the armored
cruisers, the light cruisers, the torpedo-boats and
destroyers and submarines; and the congregation
could join in the final appeal:

" Five Hundred and Seventy-nine Warships,
Two Million One Hundred and Sixty-five Thou-
sand Six Hundred and Seventy-two Tons ! "

And so Germany might cast into imposing
forms of prayer her twenty-six army corps, her
first reserves, her Landwehr, her Landsturm;
France her admirable batteries of quick-firing
guns; Russia her miUions of peasants between
the ages of twenty and forty-five — all cast in sta-
tistical, practical shape as befits a nation speaking
to its tribal god who is also its chief of staff.

Or shall we say that Christianity is like the neu-
trality of Belgium, which is guaranteed by all the
nations and inviolate in times of peace, but which
must not be allowed to stand in the way of the
interests of a people on the road to great things?
Here again I am impelled to point out the ad-
vantages of paganism and the system of tribal
gods. Take the most practical people of an-
tiquity, the Romans, and see how admirably the
system worked with them. They had a tribal god
whom they called Janus, and whenever the Ro-

LAURELMERE 141

mans were at war the doors of the temple of Janus
stood open. In times of peace the doors were
closed. A thoroughly unsentimental people the
Komans ; when they needed the help of their tribal
god, they opened the doors and addressed their
invocations to him. When peace came and they
felt that they could dispense with his protection,
they closed the doors upon him and went about
their business.

I asked Williams why he was so bitter against
the Germans and he said that he regarded them
— and especially the Kaiser — as enemies of civil-
ization. He also mentioned Belgian neutrality
and the balance of power and pointed out the
danger of universal militarism if Germany should
win. But I said it seemed to me that if Germany
were to lose she would immediately set to work to
build up a bigger army than ever and wait for
the day of revenge, just as France had waited
more than forty years. I said that the real way
to bring about the end of militarism was for Ger-
many to beat the world virtually single-handed.
The other nations would then give up the hopeless
job of competing with Germany and the Kaiser
could reduce the size of his own army.

Whereupon Williams, putting my pencil into
his own pocket, declared that the Germans needed

142 BELSHAZZAR COURT

a licking badly ; that it was long coming to them,
and that now they were going to get it good and
plenty. That clarified the situation at once. For
I could not help feeling that Williams in less than
a minute had touched the heart of a question which
thousands of editorials in the course of a month
had failed to reach. If Williams so ruthlessly
played havoc with the Kaiser's Zeppelins and pur-
sued the German battalions to the very gates of
Berlin, it was not because of militarism, or Slav
against Teuton, or the control of the seas, but
because he disliked the Kaiser and his Empire.

I asked why, and Williams said because in Ger-
many everything was Verboten. The German
Empire was one vast Central Park and the Ger-
man people spent most of their time trying to
keep off the grass. You had to walk into a railway
station by one door plainly marked Entrance and
you had to go out by another door plainly marked
Exit and if anyone dared to cross the tracks —
any foreigner that is ; you couldn't imagine a
native doing it — they sent a major-general and a
regiment of infantry and arrested you and fined
you three marks, which is about seventy-three
cents in our money. Williams said that in Ger-
many if you met an army officer you had to get
off the sidewalk and if you were awkward about it

LAURELMEEE 143

the officer drew his sword and ran you through.
He said that all male Prussians waxed their
mustaches like the Kaiser and walked about with
a get-off-the-earth air that was offensive to any
true democrat. In Germany if you wrote a letter
you had to write on the envelope " Mr. Doctor the
Honorable Member of the Higher Street-Flushing
Council Schmidt," and if you omitted the period
after Mr. you were challenged to a duel. Wil-
liams said that because of all those things he had
never had the slightest temptation to visit Ger-
many, though he would very much like to see Eng-
land and Paris.

I suggested that possibly if he overcame his
scruples and visited Berlin he might learn to see
things differently. The Germans might be a bit
stiff perhaps. But all the faults he had men-
tioned had their good side. The Germans were a
disciplined, orderly, loyal people, and it was be-
cause they knew how to take orders that they had
accomplished such great things in science, in
scholarship, in industry, in commerce.

Williams said "Rot!" Perhaps he used an-
other word — at this moment the train was pulling
up at Broad Channel and the rasp of the brake
made it difficult to hear. He said what did it mat-
ter if the Germans did all I had mentioned if it all

144 BELSHAZZAR COURT

had to be done under drill-masters. He believed
in a man doing things after his own way — ^indi-
vidual liberty, you know. He liked the Allies —
English, French, Russians — ^because they weren't
up to the Sunday-school standard. They were
human. And how about little Belgium. Wasn't
it a wonderful stand she had made against the
Kaiser?

He pulled my pencil from his pocket and im-
mediately convened a European Congress and be-
gan cutting up the map of Europe just above the
weather forecast. Within five minutes Poland had
reawakened from her degradation of one hundred
and fifty years and was ruling over two hundred
thousand square miles of territory. On Wil-
liams's map the new Poland rather interfered
with the new Belgium which in turn came danger-
ously close to running into Spain. The Rhine
gave him a good deal of trouble, but by rubbing
assiduously with his eraser he managed to change
its course so that it harmonized with the various
new boundaries. Whenever the Rhine came into
collision with an especially desirable piece of ter-
ritory for Belgium or France he curled the Rhine
around it. He then proceeded to dismember Aus-
tria-Hungary and encountered some difficulty in
distributing the pieces. At first he gave most

LAURELMERE 145

of them to Russia, but that made the latter too
big on the map, so he rubbed out part of the Czar's
empire and gave it to Servia and Roumania.

He was rounding out the new boundaries of
Germany when we reached my station. My im-
pression is that Germany lost several thousand
square miles of territory and five million inhabi-
tants. I lost my pencil.

vn

SCHOOL

Illness broke in upon the beginning of Harold's
academic career. He did not get fairly under
way until he was seven years and over. That was
not so long ago but that we can easily recall the
warm flush of pride with which we received formal
notification that our son Harold had passed his
Entrance Examinations for the Second Grade and
was now qualified to take up the reading of ordi-
nary numerals to 1000 and Roman numerals to
XX, with addition through 9's, and the multipli-
cation table to 5x9, not to mention objective
work in simple fractions and problems. The no-
tion of Harold's " entrance examinations " amused
Emmeline intensely. At least she took occasion
during the next two weeks to read the certificate
out aloud to visitors, laughing almost spontane-
ously. But when visitors were not about she
would sometimes pull out the printed card and
look at it thoughtfully, still smiling, but with
no evident signs of hilarity. She said that mom-

146

SCHOOL 147

ings, after nine, it was very quiet in the house
nowadays. It was delightful but strange.

If school brought any spiritual crisis to Harold
he gave no sign of it. An extraordinary calm in
the face of exceptional circumstances is one of
the traits I envy him. Possibly this may be be-
cause nobody or nothing that presents itself to
him from the outside can ever approach in interest
the things that are going on inside of him. He
win be shy before strangers, but I am inclined to
think that the Dalai Lama of Tibet would leave
him unruffled. Kings and Emperors have a
logical place in Harold's world of ideas, whereas
an ordinary visitor in the house needs to have his
presence explained.

Harold's self-possession was shown in the man-
ner he conducted himself during his entrance ex-
aminations. The questions were oral. He had
just been asked to name the days of the weet
when he observed that one of his shoe-laces had
come loose. He stooped, adjusted his shoe-lace,
and gave the days of the week correctly. The
operation on his shoe was not completed when he
was asked how much is three and four. He
solved the problem while still in a semicircular
position. When Emmeline heard of his behavior
during the test she was in despair. She foresaw

148 BELSHAZZAR COURT

the blasting of Harold's educational career at the
very start. She was of a mind to call up the
school authorities and let them know that the boy
did not usually answer questions from the vicinity
of his shoe tops, and that probably it was nervous-
ness. But the school authorities evidently knew
better. They must have discerned in Harold an
equanimity of the soul, a Spartan calm, which it
is one of the main purposes of pedagogy to de-
velop.

Harold's self-possession is never more conspicu-
ous than during the two hours that intervene be-
tween his getting out of bed and his departure
for school. The flight of time does not exist for
him. He goes about his toilet with exquisite de-
liberation. If anything, he dresses and washes
with greater leisureliness from Monday to Friday
than he does the other two days of the week. It
is not an aversion for learning. It is not even
indifference. Harold does not creep to school.
He goes cheerfully when we tell him that he is
ready to go. But while the business of getting
him ready is under way he views the process ob-
jectively. It is as if some strange little boy were
being washed and combed and urged through his
breakfast until the moment when everything be-
ing done, the spirit of himself, Harold, enters

SCHOOL 149

that alien body and propels it to school. As sail-
ing-master of his soul it is not for him to bother
with loading the cargo and battening down the
hatches. Only when the hawsers are ready to be
cast off — it is ten minutes of nine and Emmeline's
nerves are on edge — does the master ascend the
bridge. Once outside the door he makes excellent
speed. I have warned Harold repeatedly, but he
always trots instead of walking, and his manner
of crossing the avenue gives us some anxiety on
account of the cars and automobiles.

Sometimes I think that Emmeline and I assume
the wrong attitude toward Harold's deliberate
ways between seven and nine in the morning. In
our behalf it must be said, of course, that getting
a boy washed and dressed and fed with only two
hours to do it in is a task that calls for expedi-
tion. But in our anxiety to get Harold off to
school in time we are sometimes tempted to over-
look the boy's extraordinary spiritual activity
during these two hours. It is then that the events
of the preceding day pass in swift procession
through his mind. At table the night before
Harold has been silent as usual and apparently
indifferent to the conversation. As it turns out,
my remarks on the European situation have been
caught and registered for fuller investigation. At

150 BELSHAZZAR COURT

the dinner-table he is too busy balancing the books
of his own daily concerns. In the morning he is a
bottomless vessel of curiosity. In the morning,
while brushing his teeth or over his egg cup, he
will demand a detailed statement of the causes be-
hind the great upheaval on the Continent. A
stranger watching Harold in the act of pulling on
his stockings might suppose that the boy is im-
perfectly awake. But I know that his stockings
get tangled up because he is pondering on the
character and motives of William II and other
problems which must be immediately referred to
me who am busy before the shaving mirror.

On such occasions I confess that I frequently
dispose of the European situation with a display
of summary authority which President Wilson
would never tolerate in a Mexican dictator. Or
else I describe the Kaiser in a few ill-chosen and
inadequate phrases such as naturally suggest
themselves to one in a hurry before the shaving
mirror. Later I feel that we are unjust to the
boy and neglectful of the educational opportuni-
ties he affords us. If the secret of pedagogy is
to find the moment when the child's mind is in its
most receptive state, and feed it with the infor-
mation which, at other times, involves effort to
absorb, it seems a pity that at 7.30 in the mom-

SCHOOL 151

ing I should be busy with my razor. I have seldom
encountered a human being so eager to be in-
structed as Harold is at twenty minutes of nine
with his glass of milk still before him. Some day
an educational reformer will cut the ground from
under the Froebelians and Tolstoyans and Mon-
tessorians by devising a system of bedroom and
bathroom and breakfast-table education. Under
such a system all the instructor would have to do
would be to follow the child about while he is get-
ting ready for school and answer questions. Fif-
teen minutes with Harold while he is lacing his
shoes would give his instructor enough mental
spontaneity and spiritual thirst to equip an entire
classroom.

Our knowledge of what happens to Harold at
school between the hours of nine and one is frag-
mentary. From the school syllabus we learn, of
course, that besides being engaged upon the art
of reading numbers up to 1000 and Roman num-
erals to XX supplemented by the multiplication
table as far as 5x9, Harold is being instructed
in English Literature, in Language, in History
beginning with Early Life on Manhattan, in Na-
ture Study, in the Industrial and the Fine Arts, in
Music and Physical Training. We have, too, oc-
casional reports from the schoolroom regarding

152 BELSHAZZAR COURT

Harold's backwardness in concentration and pen-
manship, as opposed to his proficiency in Lan-
guage and History. Then there are the mothers'
meetings. But such information is either too
theoretical or too specific. Of the boy's mental
growth in the round we have no way of judging
except as he reveals himself spontaneously.

And Harold reveals very little indeed. His
school life falls from his shoulders the moment he
steps out into the street. If there were no
syllabuses, mothers' meetings, and occasional re-
ports, and we were left to find out the nature of
Harold's curriculum from what he offers to tell,
our ideas would be even more fragmentary than
they are. What we are compelled to do is to
piece together stray remarks at table or while the
boy is dressing or undressing, laconic bulletins
delivered with no particular relevance, or else if
relevant, uttered in a matter-of-fact tone, as hav-
ing no very intimate relation to himself, much as
I should throw out an item from the evening paper
to fill out a blank in conversation. Only thus did
I find out that Harold models in clay, that he sews
his own Indian suit for the Commencement
pageant, that he does practical gardening and
folk dancing. I am not sure about basket-work
and elementary wood-carving. We know that he

SCHOOL 153

writes because there has been some complaint about
his lack of neatness, which his teacher is inclined to
explain as arising from the broader defect of in-
adequate attention.

You must not suppose that Harold is an indif-
ferent scholar in the sense of being a poor student
or devoid of the sense of duty. Of his ambition I
am not so sure. The fact remains that he passed
his entrance examinations easily and that at the
end of the year, in spite of a month's absence on
account of measles, he was promoted into Grade 3.
Harold is indifferent to the extent that he does
not bring his school away with him as I bring my
own work home with me, to worry over. Harold's
reticence is partly due to his highly developed
sense of the sanctity and sufficiency of his private
thoughts. Partly it is due to the capacity of every
child to live in the moment and let it drop from
him when he passes on to the next interest, whether
it be from school to lunch, or from lunch to play,
or from play to supper. But on the whole I con-
sider Harold's lack of conversation about school as
in the highest sense a tribute to the efficiency of his
teachers and as evidence that he is happy with
them. School has fitted so well into his scheme
of life, has been accepted by him as so much a
matter of course, that he no more thinks it neces-

154 BELSHAZZAR COURT

sary to refer to school than he would to the fact
that he has enjoyed his supper.

In conversation at table Harold's teacher will
come up quite frequently. This shows that she
is a factor in his life. The mention of Harold's
teacher will sometimes irritate Emmeline because
the boy is in the habit of citing teacher as an
authority on elementary truths that Emmeline has
been at much pains to inculcate. By way of noth-
ing in particular — Harold's disclosures of his
school life are nearly always by way of nothing in
particular — he will declare that his teacher said
that to bolt food without chewing is bad for the
digestion. Inasmuch as Emmeline has devoted
several years to training Harold in that important
physiological principle, she is rather vexed that a
single statement by teacher should have assumed
an authority which prolonged instruction on her
own part has failed to attain. Or there will be a
somewhat harassing dispute as to whether it is
time for Harold to go to bed. The next morning
while pulling on his stockings Harold will declare
— incidentally Harold is always in a mood, the
morning after, to confess that he was in the wrong
the night before — that his teacher said that
boys who did not sleep enough had something
happen to their chests and shoulders which pre-

SCHOOL 155

vented them from playing football when they grew
up. I do not mean to say that teacher's word will
count as against Emmeline's. But it hurts to have
the boy look outside for sanctions to a code of be-
havior in which he has been drilled at home. I
imagine it is in such moments Emmeline feels the
first pangs of a child's ingratitude. But it is a
trait that has value and significance. When
Harold, who has been drinking milk with his meals
since infancy, observes that his teacher said that
milk is good for children, it occurs to me that he
is only experiencing that need of an external prop
for useful habits which is at the basis of religion.
Not that there is in Harold's attitude to his
teacher anything of religious awe. She is simply
the exponent of the laws of his environment, laws
which the boy knows cannot be violated as so many
of the laws enunciated at home, which are subject
to suspension and modification. To every child, I
imagine, school is the place where the rule prevails
and home is the place where exceptions to the rule
may be safely invoked. Here is the fallacy in so
much modern speculation on parents and teachers
which would confound the functions of the home
and the school by injecting the rule of affection
into the school and the rule of discipline into the
home. If the home is to remain a little isle of

156 BELSHAZZAR COURT

peace for its members I fail to see why Harold
should be less entitled than myself to invoke its
asylum. If I find in the home a refuge against
the hard competitive conditions of my business
life, Harold should rightly find in the home a
refuge against the fairly rigid rules without which
school is inconceivable, I disagree with the prev-
alent theory in not at all being sure that women
who are mothers make the best teachers. And I
am not sure that women who have taught children
in class make the best mothers. In the externals
of method and discipline they may have the ad-
vantage. But it is absurd to suppose that the
principles which guide a woman in charge of the
little community of the classroom are the rela-
tions which should subsist between the mother and
the handful of children of her own body.

An exceedingly complex subject this question of
the freedom of the child. I am not sure that I
understand it. Neither am I sure that the militant
advocates of the freedom of the child understand
it. At any rate, in so many arguments on the
rights of the child, I find a lurking argument for
the rights of parents as against the child. The
great implication seems to be that the modern way
for a mother to love her children is to have the
teacher love them for her. The modern way to

SCHOOL 157

train the child is to deny him the indulgences
which the child, as the victim of several tens of
thousands of years of foolish practice, has learned
to expect from his parents. The freedom of the
child seems to demand that he shall not bother his
parents. There must be discipline in the matter
of a child's sitting up after supper to wait
for father from the office. But he must be al-
lowed the utmost freedom in learning to read num-
bers up to 1000 and Roman numerals to XX. No
fetters must be imposed upon Harold's personality
when he is studying the date of the discovery of
America, but there are rigorous limitations on the
number of minutes he is to frolic with me in bed
or to interrupt me at the typewriter when I am
engaged in rapping out copy that the world could
spare much more easily than Harold's soul can
spare a half hour of communion with me.

Am I wrong in thinking of the reorganized child
life a la Bernard Shaw as a scheme under which
the schoolboy with shining face creeps unwillingly
home and little girls do samplers saying " God
bless our School".'' Home — a phalanstery of in-
dividuals, mature and immature, with sharply de-
fined rules against mutual intrusion. School — a
place with no rules of conduct save those working
secretly, an anarchy saved from chaos by a con-

158 BELSHAZZAE COURT

cealed benevolent despotism & la Montessori. The
advanced child culturistg puzzle me. In life they
simply adore self-assertion in the face of adverse
circumstances. In life they believe that character-
building is attained by knocking one's head against
environment, and love for liberty is nourished only
under despotism. Why not apply the same logic
to the child in school? What sort of mental and
moral fiber is developed by having the child in
conflict with nothing in particular? How can
anyone, child or adult, revolt against the mush
of the super-Froebelian, super-Montessorian meth-
ods of pedagogical non-resistance?

I should be more vehement against Ute compli-
cated and expensive machinery of Montessorians
and other snperpedagogues if I thought tl^ir
methods really as efficacious as people would have
me believe. I should then protest against the re-
finements of an educational system which is within
the reach only of the privileged few. I am enough
of a dsmagogae to grow angry at the thought of
all those beautifully balanced systems of peda-
gogy? of education by music and the dance and
rhythmic physical development which demand elab-
orate plants, expensive teachers, and a leisureli-
ness which the State and the city can never supply
to the children of the masses. If I were a rejoin-

SCHOOL 159

tionist of the sanguine type I should be content to
make education difficult and expensive and then
insist that all children have it. But I am not a
revolutionary optimist, and until the modern State
is prepared to spend on its schools fifty times as
much as it does to-day, I resent the tendency
toward a double system of education, one of joy-
ous and harmonic development for the children of
the rich and one of mechanical routine and hard
practicality for the other nine children out of ten.
That is, I don't resent it. What I mean is that
I should resent it if the efficacy of the costly mod-
em systems were really superior to the ready-
made store-clothes education offered to the chil-
dren of the democracy. The expensive educa-
tional systems are not a cause but an effect. Any
system adopted by the rich for the education of
their children will result in the bringing up of
sanguine, self-assertive, harmoniously developed
thoroughbreds. As between the graduate of the
Eurythmic schools of Jacques Dalcroze and the
graduate of Public School number 55, Manhattan,
I admit that the Eurythmic child will come much
nearer to the Hellenic ideal of free-stepping,
graceful, masterful individuality. But it is not
Montessori and Dalcroze that make the child of
the income-tax-paying classes a Superchild. It

160 BELSHAZZAR COURT

is the habit of paying income tax that produces
Superchildren. The mediaeval methods of Eton
and Harrow have been turning out precisely the
ideal product in the shape of the English gentle-
man if poise, a rich appetite, and the assumption
of one's own supreme worth are what you are
striving for.

I am enough of a demagogue to have been
rather cast down when it was decided to send
Harold to a private school. There were reasons
enough. The boy's health, upon experiment, was
not equal to the strain of a school day from nine
till three in the afternoon (actually Harold's
school day began at eight in the morning because
of the part-time system enforced by the over-
crowding of the classes, which Montessori will
have to take into consideration). Harold's day
now is from nine o'clock till one, with a brief re-
cess for play and an intermission for lunch if
desired. And a schedule which includes physical
training, nature study, clay modeling, basket
weaving, and pageant rehearsals seems in no
danger of overtaxing the child's mind. (Once
more I fall victim to my antiquated prejudices,
when I imply that modeling in clay and sewing In-
dian costumes do not involve a strain on the
mind. I know that the newer psychology and the

SCHOOL 161

newer pedagogy have shown that there is more
cerebration involved in cutting out paper pat-
terns than in memorizing the multiplication table.
But I am a slave to the old vocabulary. The
reader forewarned will make the proper deduc-
tions. )

Nevertheless I did feel a pang at separating
Harold from the public school. Emmeline laughed
and asked whether I was afraid that Harold would
turn out a snob. Perhaps I was a bit afraid of
that, but at bottom it was not fear that Harold
would go to the bad in his private school, but that
he would do very well there. In other words, it
was the feeling I have just expressed, whether it
was fair that Harold should be put into the way
of having a very delightful time at school, with
easy hours under splendid hygienic conditions and
work reduced largely to play, while so many of
the boys he plays with cannot afford these advan-
tages. That is, not advantages. As I have said,
Harold will probably get no more out of his small
carefully-guarded classes than the other children
will get out of the overcrowded classes in the pub-
lic school. But as a sign of social inequality the
thing offended me. If you will, you may call this
a gospel of envy. But in my heart I could not
help taking sides with the children of the disin-

162 BELSHAZZAR COURT

herited against Harold as a representative of the
exploiting classes.

As to the fear of Harold's turning into a snob,
that has long been shown to be completely un-
founded. On this subject Harold's itinerary from
his school to his home is illuminating evidence. I
have said that in the morning Harold trots to
school. In the morning Harold probably gets to
school in five minutes. Returning it takes him
half an hour. Emmeline has questioned him on
the subject. It appears that in returning from
school Harold maps a course due north by west
by east by south so as to cover every local bit of
topography that comes within his knowledge dur-
ing the play hours of the afternoon. He tacks
around unnecessary corners. He beats his way up
a hill in the park which is a favorite tourney-place
for the marble players of the vicinity. He skirts
the shore of several window displays to the con-
tents of which he has turned the conversation at
home on several occasions. For five minutes at a
time he is totally becalmed against some smooth
expanse of brick wall excellent for handball prac-
tice or on a sheltered corner for a bit of prelimi-
nary knuckle exercise with his agates and his
" immies." The White Wing flushing the pave-
ment engages Harold's attention for as long as

SCHOOL 163

the work may seem to demand. Then, having as-
sured himself that the world at 1.30 in the after-
noon is very much as he left it at six o'clock the
night before, he hastens to his lunch.

No, there is little danger of the boy's growing
up an aristocrat. The fierce democracy of the
Street has him in its grasp. He chooses his play-
mates by preference from the lower classes. He
is like Walt Whitman in the way he singles out
the dirtiest little boy in the block and says to him,
" Camerado." He takes his fellow men as he finds
them. When Harold was first sent off to school
Emmeline was concerned to find a nice little boy
for him to play with. She discovered one in a
classmate of Harold's. We invited him to the
house, and in half an hour a considerable portion
of the wall paper in Harold's room was hanging in
fringes. But in spite of a common basis of taste
and temperament the two boys are not much to-
gether, for the very reason, I presume, that their
friendship has been to some extent imposed on
them from above. No; Harold's tastes go down
straight to the foundations of our social structure.
Without recognizing cla^s-distinctions he would
rather play marbles with the son of a retail trades-
man than with the son of a college professor, and
with the son of a janitor than with the son of a

164 BELSHAZZAR COURT

storekeeper. If the janitor is a negro so much
the better. The negro boys have the advantage
over Harold in the matter of tint at the beginning
of a game of marbles. But within half an hour
Harold has overcome the handicap. If anything,
his is the deeper shade of brown, though his color
is not so evenly distributed. In such guise I can
recognize Harold by a sort of instinct. But the
only way a stranger could tell the child of Cauca-
sian descent from the child of the Hamite would
be by measuring Harold's cephalic index.

It is a serious problem — the gains of democracy
and the price we must pay. There are obvious
advantages: the boy's education in the sense of
human fellowship without regard to caste and
color; his education in the rough and ready but
fairly equitable laws of the Street; his gain in
self-confidence and self-restraint in play; not to
mention the extremely beneficent effect on his ap-
petite and his digestion. I have watched the boy
at his marbles in the park, more eager, more
drunken with the joy of existence than he is at
school or in the house. I have seen him sprawl
down on his knees and with the pad of his palm
and four outstretched fingers measure ofiF eight or
ten horrible hand spaces in the dust from the hole
to his opponent's marble. I have seen him rise

SCHOOL 165

from the earth like Antaeus, triumphant but hor-
ribly besmirched, with the blue of his eyes gleam-
ing piratically through the circumjacent soil; I
have watched him and rejoiced and had my qualms.
The price that Harold pays for democracy is in
a slovenliness of speech which I find merely of-
fensive but Emmeline finds utterly distracting.
It seems a pity to have his school drill in phonetics
and the memorizing of good literature vitiated by
the slurred and clipped syllables of the streets.
Harold says, " It is me," and frequently he says,
" It is nuttin'." The final g of the participle has
virtually disappeared from his vocabulary. He
sometimes says, " I ain't got nuttin'." While Em-
meline is distracted I am merely offended, because
I recall that there is a great body of linguistic
authority growing up in favor of Harold's demo-
cratic practices in phonetics and grammar. When
Harold says, " It is me," Professor Lounsbury
should worry. By the time Harold grows up it
will probably be good grammar to say, " I ain't
got nothing." By the time Harold grows up the
Decalogue, in its latent recension, will read, " Thou
shalt not have none other gods before I," and
" Thou shalt not bear no false witness against
none of thy neighbors." I must not forget that
whereas I have been brought up on Matthew

166 BELSHAZZAR COURT

Arnold, De Quincey, and Stevenson, Harold is
growing up in the age of John Masefield. If the
greatest literature and the foremost language is
to be racy of the soil — and for that matter not
only our speech and our literature, but if our
morals and our social outlook are to be racy of
the soil — if in every section of life the cry is back
to the land, to the primitive, to the unashamed,
sex-education, untrammeled art, democracy at its
broadest, if — ^well, what I mean is that in any
civilization based upon close contact with the soil,
Harold will not be lost. Soil is right in his line.
I am less concerned with the effect of the street
upon Harold's vernacular because the boy seems
gratefully immune against the more sordid aspects
of the open-air life. His phonetics and his gram-
mar are deteriorating, but there is no trace of foul-
ness in his speech and in his thoughts. The rea-
son is that Harold's open-air activities are con-
fined entirely to play. His democracy centers
about the ball ground and the marble pit. His
absorption in games is so complete — too complete,
to judge by the nervous exhaustion it sometimes
brings — that it leaves no leisure or inclination for
idle speech. His technical vocabulary of games
is comprehensive. I sometimes marvel at the ease
with which he has mastered the patois of sport —

SCHOOL 167

those cabalistic words which, shouted at the proper
moment, signify that Harold prefers to let his
marble rest and have his opponent shoot at him
or that he has chosen to mark ofF so many hand
spaces in the dirt and shoot at his opponent. But
once the game is done he comes upstairs. He does
not share in the spiritual life of the gang and
he knows absolutely nothing of the premature
intimacies of street childhood with the bitterness
of life. On the whole I find the balance is in favor
of marbles and democracy.

Harold in the open air is an exceedingly impor-
tant factor and a badly neglected one in present-
day discussion of the child. The talk is either of
the school or the home. If play is taken into
account it is the regulated play of the school
ground. Yet the Street is the citadel of the lib-
erties of the child. Take the actual question of
hours in Harold's day. He spends nearly twelve
hours in bed, from seven to seven. He spends two
hours, almost, at his meals. He spends four hours
at school. He spends five hours at least in play.
Under such an arrangement all talk about the
despotism of school and the despotism of parents
loses meaning to me. I have shown that the boy's
school life is happy. But even if it were not, even
if his body and soul were subjected to the tyran-

168 BELSHAZZAR COURT

nies the sentimental revolutionist is so fond of call-
ing up, those twelve hours of sleep and five hours
of play are a reservoir of physical and spiritual
recuperation which would make life more than tol-
erable to Harold. On the whole I think I am not
less sensitive than Harold to pain and oppression.
But if my employer were to let me sleep twelve
hours in the twenty-four and play five hours and
spend two hours at table, I should consider myself
a very happy man.

I have reserved my confession for the very last.
I find it difficult to take school at Harold's age —
or for that matter at any age — ^seriously enough
to grow extremely agitated over its problems.
Montessori or Dr. Birch — the difi^erence is not
vast. Naturally I do not go as far as Mr.
Squeers. School is just a ripple on the surface of
the ocean of young life and feeling, and whether
the ripple shapes after the Froebel pattern or the
Montessori wrinkle makes little difference to the
depths below. I can make the assertion with con-
fidence about Harold without any very precise
knowledge of what are the depths in him.

VIII

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE

Theee are anxious days in Belshazzar Court
when the spirit of meekness and self-sacrifice de-
scends upon Harold. The change usually comes
on without warning, though by watching very
closely we can detect the insidious approach of
Harold's goodness. He will come up from his
marbles or ball game a bit earlier than usual and
put away his tools with a gentle air of disen-
chantment. Like Ecclesiaste^, Byron, and Ga-
briele D'Annunzio, he has found the emptiness
of pleasure and he makes a voluntary oiFer of his
entire stock of agates to the baby, which reminds
me of King Lear. At table he will emerge com-
pletely out of the world of private concerns in
which he customarily dwells and ask how cannon
are made and what is the immediate outlook for
Home Rule. But more frequently his days of
calm will follow upon a night of wrack and storm,
which leaves every member of the family ex-
hausted. The exact course of Harold's moods is
still to be put on the map.

169

170 BELSHAZZAR COURT ,

At any rate, soon after six in the morning,
when the orchestral chorus of Belshazzar Court
is tuning up with a click of water-pipes, the whir
of coffee-grinders, and muflBed explosions from the
gas-range turned on in full force by sleepy-eyed
maids, we grow aware of a saintly presence in
Harold's room. Someone is moving about gently
with evident concern for those of us still in bed.
Doors open with the same discreet caution. Soft-
ened footsteps pad along the hallway, and there is
a gentlemanly splashing in the bathroom. Inves-
tigation discloses that it is a quarter of seven and
Harold in an arm-chair before the window reading
his Arabian Nights. He is washed, dressed,
combed, and brushed. The problems of the toilet,
the choice of a suit for the day, the discovery of
the one unlucky shoe which always gets lost —
all these customary intricacies have been solved,
swiftly, surely, and with an economy of motion
and noise that would delight the hearts of a con-
gressful of scientific engineers.

Naturally we ask Harold whether he is not feel-
ing well. He says that he is very well. But he
says it in a tone of seraphic patience that leaves
us unconvinced, and when Harold announces that
it is his intention always to get up at this hour
in the future and to dress without bothering his

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 171

mother, Emmeline calls him to her and feels his
head. His forehead is cool. His tongue is red
and moist. His eyes are clear. But just when
Emmeline is ready to be reassured Harold asks
whether the baby had been restless and hopes that
she did not disturb our sleep in any way. There-
upon Emmeline feels his forehead once more and
recalls that whenever he has been seriously ill the
evil came on slowly.

Harold is thoughtful over his breakfast, but
eats neither too fast nor too slowly, and with none
of the minor accidents that sometimes mark his
self-absorbed demeanor at table. Emmeline
watches him, and Harold, knowing that he is
watched, pretends not to notice. Emmeline recalls
that this is the way people behave who are gravely
afflicted. They pretend not only that they are not
ill and are not anxious about themselves, but that
they do not notice other people's anxiety about
themselves. About half-past seven Harold gets
up from the table and asks which coat is he to
wear to school. Inasmuch as this is one hour and
twenty minutes earlier than his usual time for de-
parture, Emmeline shakes her head. She even
makes a motion to feel Harold's brow again, but I
protest that the constant friction is enough in it-
self to give the boy a temperature. So we tell the

172 BELSHAZZAR COURT

boy that it is too early to go to school and he may
play in his room. He says he is tired of play and
he would prefer to practice his penmanship because
he had been told that if his writing improved he
would be moved up to the upper half of the class.
" I like to write my words in the morning," he says.
" I am going to do it every day." He works at
his model sentences until Emmeline tells him that
he has done enough and must now play awhile.

"Have I time?" he asks, and his voice is like
St. Cecilia. It is heartrending, this fear of dread-
ful evil impending over Harold which one discerns
but cannot localize. He insists on leaving for
school twenty minutes too early. Before going he
declares that he likes to go to school with his shoes
nicely polished. He had polished them himself.

At night I find the atmosphere sultry with ap-
prehension. The suspense begins to tell. Harold
came home directly from school instead of follow-
ing his usual roundabout course by which he cov-
ers three blocks in thirty-five minutes. At lunch
he asked for stewed carrots. Harold detests
stewed carrots, and there were none for lunch nor
had there been any for several days in deference to
his prejudices. He was disappointed to hear that
there were no carrots, and he asked that he might
have some to-morrow and every day thereafter.

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 173

Determined to break up this mood of painful beati-
tude, Emmeline asks whether he would like some
ice cream for dessert. " Is ice cream good for
me? " he asks, and nearly brings his mother to
tears.

If only he would break something! But no.
Harold, whose course about the house is so fre-
quently strewn with chairs shoved out of place
and things dropping from tables and book-shelves,
moves about like Isadora Duncan, a graceful
wraith among inviting corners and edges. After
lunch, I am told, he pulled the heaviest accessible
volume from the book-shelves, a book which he
knew had no pictures in it, and he read several
pages of Clayhanger with extraordinary concen-
tration. He did not refuse to go out to play, and
his apparent indifference was belied by the fact
that he did not reappear until late in the after-
noon. There was a gleam of hope in that, and
Emmeline was further encouraged when he came
upstairs in about his customary condition of be-
smirchment ; we seemed to be seeing light.

Harold was in his room making ready for bed
while we at table wondered what it all meant.
Suddenly there was the sound of a crash followed
by a yell. Emmeline raised her head and a look
of ineffable relief came into her face. The yell

174 BELSHAZZAR COURT

emanated from the baby. She yelled again and
then Harold shouted. They alternated for some
time and then fell into a duet of indignant clamor.
I went to study the situation on the spot. I found
that just as he had taken off one shoe and was
busy with the other something had happened to
Harold's soul which impelled him to get out of bed
and run out into the hall and overturn the baby's
doll carriage with its precious burden. He had
then taken the doll and thrown it under the bed and
was making a pretense of climbing into the doll
carriage. It took some time to disentangle the
two, but we did it with glad hearts. Harold was
himself again.

I am convinced that he has a sense of humor.
It does not consist in saying the bright things
which are funny to us but quite serious to the
child who utters them. To the extent that children
are consciously humorous they are so in action
rather than in speech. And even in action it is
hard to tell how much is humor and how much is
mischief which accidentally takes on an amusing
aspect. An example of this kind would be the
disposition Harold once made of his garters for
several nights running. Switching on the light
in his room one night, when the boy was fast

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 175

asleep, I discovered his garters neatly strung over
the chandelier. Even by standing on his bed
Harold could not reach the chandelier. The feat
therefore must have required some very deft
angling and a degree of patience that I never
thought was in the boy. I suppose Harold's gar-
ters on the gas bracket would be humor to Pro-
fessor Bergson, since the incongruity of the result
must have been present to the boy's mind. Yet
the impelling motive was mischief.

But Harold was without question a self-con-
scious humorist when I found him one night in
bed supposedly trying to go to sleep. He had
taken a piece of wrapping cord and tied one end
to his left thumb and the other end to the bed-
stead. When I asked what it all meant he said it
was to keep himself from falling out of bed. Is it
paternal pride in me which makes me discern a
master's touch in that episode? At any rate, there
was here a calculated effect upon a possible audi-
ence. He had been lying there in the dark and
chuckled and waited for someone to come in.

It is no argument against Harold as a humorist
that he is also a good deal of a baby. Whatever
may be the case with your epigrammatic wits and
their penny stock of worldly disenchantment, true
humor comes out of an inextinguishable innocence

176 BELSHAZZAR COURT

of the heart. Mark Twain had it and Mr. Dooley
has it and Swift had it, and I believe that Harold
has it. Only the innocent heart can pass quickly
from laughter to tears; laughter which means a
child-like contentment with the goodness of the
world, and tears which mean profound discourage-
ment with the badness of the world, instead of the
thin-lipped wit which is based on the conviction
that there is no good and no bad — ^unless the good
is bad and the bad good — ^and that it doesn't mat-
ter anyway. But though I have my theory pat
on the subject, I find it always a shock to think
that a humorist capable of a masterpiece like tying
himself into bed with a wrapping string should oc-
casionally be discovered at play in a corner with
furnishings from the wardrobe of his sister's doll.
Not frequently, in justice to Harold, but it
happens.

Nor is it against Harold's sense of humor that
he will often laugh without occasion but because
of his mere capacity for laughter. Harold's ex-
perience with the Home Page in the afternoon
newspaper is illuminating on this point. The Home
Page, as is well known, is equally divided between
comic pictures and text and serious aids to house-
keeping, a division at that time unknown to Harold,
who was interested only in the comics. These pic-

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 177

tures he had got me into the habit of expounding
to him, and since the artist knew his audience,
Harold laughed in the proper places. However, it
happened one day that Harold, not having had
enough of the comic pictures, insisted that I read
to him the printed text in small type distributed
between the pictures. I read all the jokes, and he
was not yet satisfied. So I went on and read the
Household Hints to him — how young potatoes
should be kept in a small flat, and how linen hand-
kerchiefs should be ironed, and what will relieve
rheumatism of the arm-joints; and when I men-
tioned new potatoes or linen or rheumatism of
the arm- joints Harold held his sides and shrieked.
Evidently this could have happened only to the
Innocent soul laden to the bursting point with
laughter and waiting for the prick of the magic
word like potatoes or linen handkerchief or rheu-
matism to release the flood.

He has his dark moods. They come on as sud-
denly as his attacks of goodness. There is the
mood of destruction. Not that Harold is con-
tinent at best. He consumes clothes, books, toys
with a swiftness which may be the sign of an
enviable capacity for living in the moment only.
Who knows? As modem parents it would be pre-

178 BELSHAZZAR COURT

sumptuous in us to attempt to impose our own
standards of orderliness and routine upon the boy.
But the moods of destruction to which I refer are
Harold's ordinary state raised to the nih power.
On such a day his path is through wreckage.
Things break, tear, rip, slice, and crumble to
pieces under his fingers. His own body does not
escape. It is a day of falls, cuts, bruises, a gen-
eral malaise, which expresses itself in frequent
tears ; and when he is not crying he is on the edge
of whimpering. The moral law and the law of
gravitation seem to be simultaneously repealed for
him. Objects that ought to remain suspended on
the wall precipitate themselves to the floor. Ob-
jects like chairs and footstools which properly be-
long on the floor turn somersaults, mount upon the
beds, clamber over each other. Harold is by turns
spiteful, sullen, boisterous, unhappy, and as a
rule, bandaged. These are days when all the woe
of the world seems to have descended upon
his shoulders.

I have often wondered why educators and re-
formers who are so concerned for the freedom of
the child will deny the child's right to such occa-
sional moods of sullen rebellion. For ourselves,
grown-up men and women, we are very ready to
claim the slightest excuse for anti-social hehavior.

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 179

A touch of indigestion will serve a man as suflS-
cient reason for coming down to the office with a
scowl and barking all morning at his subordinates.
And the victims of his temper also think the rea-
son sufficient: the poor fellow probably ate un-
wisely last night after the theater. The dyspeptic
toiich will cause a man to douse himself in oceans
of self-pity as if any reason on earth existed why
he should wreak himself on welsh rarebits at
midnight.

Whereas the child? With full knowledge of
the delicate nature of his physiological machinery
we yet deny that any mechanical dislocation is suf-
ficient excuse for his making other people uncom-
fortable. Up to the age of four or five the right
to be fretful after loss of sleep is probably recog-
nized by most parents. But between five and
twelve, say, the presumption is that a boy must
either be under the doctor's care or else in perfect
health. The intervening stages of discomfort,
fatigue, nervous strain, are overlooked. Sullen-
ness, that most disagreeable of qualities in a child,
can easily be traced to a physiological basis, and
one much less reprehensible than the midnight
rarebit of the adult or the wild debauches of shop-
ping and dress-fitting that lead to headaches. But
whereas strong men can go down to the office and

180 BELSHAZZAR COURT

growl and women can retire to their rooms with
a handkerchief around the head, the child is de-
nied the privilege of seeking the seclusion which
he needs. If like a young animal he looks for a
comer in which to suck his wounded paw, we call
it sullenness and insist that he remain in our so-
ciety and find it agreeable. The right of the child
to be out-of-sorts occasionally is one of the
privileges which must be inscribed in any charter
of freedom that the Century of the Child is to
draw up for him.

But if Harold is destructive he is not blood-
thirsty. In this respect I believe he is an excep-
tional child. He is warlike, but a love of gore for
its own sake does not possess him. He will arm
himself with a crusader's dirk made of a lead pencil
and a clothespin and inflict gaping wounds on the
mattress and the pillow, but I have never heard
him ask for buckets of blood to drink as other
children will do. In stories of Christian martyrs
and the lions I do not recall that he has taken
sides with the lions. He is happy to shoot down
countless enemies — represented by ninepins or
perhaps his sister's dolls — with an improvised rifle,
but he does not go to the extreme of mutilating
his enemies and parading their reeking heads upon
the point of the sword hke other boys of his age I

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 181

know. The sight of his own life's fluid stirs him
to inexpressible outcries of anguish and imaginary
pain. I recall one visit to the dentist, a grim and
prolonged engagement in which Harold lost a
tooth and the dentist nearly lost his reason. That
entire afternoon, after he was quite well, the boy
would apply his handkerchief to his mouth every
ten minutes and, detecting an imaginary red spot,
he would howl like someone in Dante.

Actual pain he bears very well. If he cries when
he is ill, it is largely out of self-pity. Properly
approached he will submit to painful ministrations
with very little outcry. The proper way to ap-
proach him is to argue. Direct bribery is of no
avail. In fact, the mention of nice things he may
have when he gets well only stirs him to clamor at
the thought of what he is losing in the immediate
present. But he will listen to reason, provided
reason, like other medicaments, is applied with
infinite patience. He must have time to think
your proposition over. Given time, he will brace
himself to his duty. When the episode is over, he
is irradiated with a glow of self-appreciation
that cheers us all up. He will compliment Emme-
line on her surgical skill ; he will remark that he ex-
pected the operation to be much more complicated
than he found it to be ; he may even offer to have

182 BELSHAZZAR COURT

it done all over again, an oiFer which we receive in
the spirit in which it is submitted, as an evidence
of good will rather than as a practical issue.

In writing of Harold I find myself continually
returning to the one trait so predominant in the
boy as almost to constitute, for us, his personality.
And yet I dare say he is not unlike other children
in that respect. I refer to his self-contained
spiritual life, to the secret fountain of his thoughts
into which he will grant us only a glimpse, and
that involuntarily. The educational sociologues
confound hypocrisy with honest reticence when
they insist that the child shall be a sort of infantile
George Moore with his heart and whatever else is
inside him on his sleeve. It is one thing for Harold
to hold back some confession of misdeeds, to re-
fuse an answer to a direct question bearing on a
practical problem of mutual concern. It is quite
another thing that he does not consider the secret
processes of his soul as material for general con-
versation. He has, of course, his periods of gar-
rulity ; at bedtime, for instance, when he will rack
his brain for topics to postpone the turning down
of the light and the closed door. On such occa-
sions when invented matter fails him he will take
up in desperation some subject that is really close
to his heart ; but rarely at any other time.

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 183

It is an error to suppose that children take pleas-
ure in asking unanswerable questions; at least
children of Harold's age. They have delicacy.
Harold may be insistent in putting questions which
are difficult simply because the matter is hard to
explain, but he is aware that there are other topics
which we do not want to talk about, and these he
will avoid to spare our susceptibilities, or else ap-
proach them with circumspection. The mystery
of death, for instance, is a subject that fascinates
the mind of every child. But Harold, having en-
countered extreme reluctance on our part to dis-
cuss the matter with him, will display the most
extraordinary ingenuity in bending conversation
in that direction, always framing his questions so
as to leave the initiative to us. I am afraid that
the crabbed piece-meal information we offer him
gives him a rather contemptuous opinion at times
of our courage or our intelligence. His own im-
pressions of the great mystery I suspect are not
far from the truth, but whenever I try to find out
he will turn the subject. Partly this is because
of a general reluctance to frame his creed upon
demand, but partly also it is his desire to spare us
the embarrassment of fibbing.

Harold's economy in putting questions is a
thing for which I am profoundly grateful. It

184 BELSHAZZAR COURT

spares me the hypocrisy of saying, " I don't
know " on matters of which I do know something
but consider to be outside the sphere of Harold's
legitimate concern. It spares me the ignominy
of inventing cocksure answers on subjects of a
harmless nature, but on which I am unfortunately
ignorant. But difficulties will arise. In the field
of natural history, for example, I think I know
something of general principles. I think I could
give a fair account of the difference between Dar-
winism and Weismanism. I think I know what
the mutation theory of De Vries means. By re-
freshing my memory in the encyclopaedia I could
sum up the Mendelian hypothesis without getting
more than half the specific facts wrong. But un-
fortunately Harold is not interested in the dif-
ference between Darwin and Lamarck, but in the
difference between an apple tree and a maple.
There he is better informed than I, and it has
often been his lot to instruct me. He offers his
information in gentlemanly fashion, without a
trace of pedantry. On the whole I think that as
between the things Harold asks me and the things
he tells me the balance Is in favor of the latter.

Harold's views upon me are perfectly natural:
that is, they are extremely complex. I am a be-

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 185

nevolent power, but not an omnipotent power. I
am the power that promises circuses and generous
quantities of confectionery, only to have my cir-
cuses countermanded and my candy estimates
radically revised downward by a higher power
that works for the ultimate best interests of
Harold ; it is spelled Emmeline. But if the boy is
thus brought to recognize the limitations on my
authority, this applies only within the home and
in matters concerning his own welfare. With re-
gard to Harold, I am a sort of inferior deity who
is himself subject to the power of Necessity. But
outside — in the vague universe included within
the limits of the Office, to which I depart and from
which I return like Apollo Helios into and out
from the sea, except that I set in the morning
and rise at night — I am to Harold a divinity of the
first magnitude. It is his general impression that
I write all the fourteen pages of the newspaper
for which I am working; that in my outside time
I write the high-class monthlies ; that I have writ-
ten the greater part of the books in my library,
including the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and that
having written all these books, I have also printed
them, bound them, and sold them at hundreds of
dollars a copy.

Such being his earnest belief with regard to my

186 BELSHAZZAB COURT

professional capacities, it is natural that when en-
gaged in the most ancient children's game in the
world, namely, the matching of fathers, Harold's
fancy should give itself free rein. I presume it is
the rudiments of that sentiment which we later
describe as patriotism that impels Harold to claim
for his father superhuman achievements in ath-
letics and business. At that the boy has his
limitations of conscience. There was one occasion
when his friend Herbert asserted that his father
once took an ordinary bamboo rod and caught a
whale. It was a comfort to have Harold assume
a skeptical attitude, and instead of declaring that
his father once caught a fish as big as the Wool-
worth Building, content himself with impugning
his opponent's veracity. Probably Harold's sense
of humor here enters to apprise him that it is suf-
ficient to have a father who can throw a baseball
further than any man alive, lift heavier weights
than Sandow, and earn $1,000 an hour by writing
the world's best literature, without claiming for
him the impossible feat of catching a whale at the
end of a bamboo pole.

How does Harold reconcile my character as a
composite Rockefeller — Brickley — William Dean
Howells with the fact that when I have promised

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 187

him a bar of chocolate after supper I have been
sometimes forced to sit by silently and have my
decision reversed with costs in an elaborate opin-
ion by United States Supreme Court Justice Em-
meline, nobody dissenting? If on such occasions
the sense of frustrated desire does not embitter
the boy overmuch, it may be that he will recognize
my subjection to the above-mentioned law of Ne-
cessity, to which all must bend. Otherwise I sup-
pose Harold regards me with a fair measure of
contempt, possibly mixed with pity. Sometimes
there is no trace of pity. Sometimes Harold be-
haves abominably. While Justice Emmeline's
opinion with regard to the circus or the chocolate
is being formulated, Harold will lend me a
sneaking sort of moral support, eying me
furtively and pulling the longest face at his dis-
posal without daring to commit himself in words.
But once the sentence of reversal is pronounced
Harold knows where his bread is buttered. He
flops shamefully to the winning side, and in his
zeal to make his peace with the de facto powers,
he turns on me in the most shameful manner, de-
claring that Father is always offering him things
that are not good for him, that circuses are a bore
anyhow, and that he would much rather wait till
to-morrow and have a small bit of chocolate with

188 BELSHAZZAR COURT

the assurance that it would do him good instead of
harm. Yes he would, the traitor!

And yet the boy's conduct is natural. When the
bitterness of his base desertion passes, I am the
first to acknowledge the justice as well as the
prudence of his course. I am a good enough imi-
tation god for Harold's ordinary purposes, a Baal
for moments of ease and prosperity and guilty
dalliance. But when adversity falls, and the su-
preme test comes between Baal and the Jehovah
of justice and righteous Necessity, he flies instinc-
tively to the embrace of the Higher Power, which
is Emmeline. He turns his back with decision on
the circuses and the chocolates of the Gentiles
and meekly confesses the authority of one in whose
hands are the gifts that follow upon a sane wor-
ship of the Law. Ex tenebris — at midnight, when
Harold wakes sometimes with sudden pain, or in
the hush of the sickroom, or in the long twilight
of convalescence when the passions run low and
Harold is conscious only of his frail mortality, it
is not upon me that Harold calls. At such mo-
ments I am like Baal and Odin and Jupiter
Olympus when their moment comes. I am dis-
tinctly de trop. At such moments, with doctors
and nurses in the house, and an air of general
ineptitude oppressing me, what can I do but retire

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 189

to my own room and try to read Galsworthy in a
thick Goetterdammerung of tobacco smoke until
Necessity, snatching a moment from the sickroom,
insists that I put on my hat and go out for a
walk?

As I think back over the random observations
and memories I have here thrown together I feel
that this paper demands an honester title than the
one I set down at the beginning. Of course,
" Harold and the Universe " is good for catch-
penny purposes. But " Field Notes on Harold "
would have been the truer heading. There is little
here of that fine consecutiveness and subtlety
which you find in modem theories about the child ;
but so many of these theories are untrue. There
is this element of unity in my remarks that they
are intended to convey an impression of this com-
plex thing called the Child which is now being re-
duced to such easy formulas — formulas which in
the name of a higher freedom for the child
threaten the true freedom of the child with our
rough groping invasions into his spontaneous soul
life. Or else they set up a child of straw, describ-
ing him as a victim of despotism which is not so, as
a slave to futile standards which is not so, as a
neglected, pitiful creature, which is not so. Exag-

190 BELSHAZZAR COURT

geration, which lies at the basis of every enthu-
siasm, has exaggerated out of our common talk
the old, true notion of the child as an inexhaustible
source of freedom and happiness, as a being who
stands in no need of charters of rights and declara-
tions of independence, because these are rights
which we cannot alienate, however we try.

Who am I, to kick against the formula makers?
In my description of Harold I might easily have
revealed a greater degree of precise information
and a firmer grasp on general principles. Harold
is an enormous investment. He represents a vast
capitalization of sacrifices, hopes, labors, fears,
and doubts. And yet if you were to ask me to
issue a prospectus on Harold, describing how soon
and just how big the dividends will be on the capi-
talization, I could not tell you. On the basis of
the preceding account I should have the greatest
difficulty in listing Harold on the Stock Exchange,
not to speak of having him designated as a legal
investment for savings banks and insurance com-
panies. Wild-cat speculator that I am, who am
I to criticise the earnest men and women who
would establish childhood on the sure basis of
Standard Oil Subsidiaries and English Consols?
But on this subject I prefer to be a gambler and
take a chance.

^y CONINGSBY T>AW SON
The Garden Without Walls

The story of the adventures in love of the hero till his
thirtieth year is as fascinating as are the three heroines.
His Puritan stock is in constant conflict with his Pagan
imagination. Ninth printing. $1.35 net.

"Never did hero find himself the adored of three more enchanting
heroines. A book which will deserve the popularity it is certain to
achieve." — The Independent.

"Mr. Dawson has dared splendidly to write, in a glorious abandon,
a story all interwoven with a glow of romance almost medieval in its
pagan color, yet wholly modern in its import." — Samuel Abbott, in
The Boston Herald.

"All vivid with the color of life; a novel to compel not only absorbed
attention, but .long remembrance." — The Boston Transcript.

"The most enjoyable first novel since De Morgan's 'Joseph Vance.*"

— /, B, Kerfoot, in Life,

The Raft

A story of high gallantry, which teaches that even mod-
ern life is an afiair of courageous chivalry. The story is
crowded with over thirty significant characters, some
whimsical, some tender, some fanciful; all are poignantly
real with their contrasting ideals and purposes.

"The Raft" is a panorama of everyday, available
romance. Just ready. $1.35 net.

Florence on a Certain Night (and Other Poems)

12mo. $1.25 net.

"The work of a true lyric poet who 'utters his own soul.'"

— Literary Digest.

"The preeminent quality in all Mr. Dawson's verse is the union of
delicacy and strength. A generation which has all but forgotten the
meaning of the phrase 'to keep himself unspotted from the world' has
great need of this sort of poetry." — Providence Journal.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S NOVELS

" Why All This Populasity ? " asks E. V. Lucas, writ-
ing in the Outlook of De Morgan's Novels. He answers:
De Morgan is "almost the perfect example of the humorist;
certainly the completest since Lamb. . . . Humor, how-
ever, is not all. ... In the De Morgan world it is hard to find
an unattractive figure. . . . The charm of the young women,
all brave and humorous and gay, and all trailing clouds
of glory from the fairyland from which they have just come."

JOSEPH VANCE

The story of a great sacrifice and a life-long love.

"The book of the last decade; the best thing in fiction since Mr.
Meredith and Mr. Hardy ; must take its place as the first great English
novel that has appeared in the twentieth century." — LEWIS MELVILLE
in TVfw VorJh Tintes Saturday Rtview.

AUCE-FOR-SHORT

The romance of an unsuccessful man, in which the long
buried past reappears in London of to-day.

** If any writer of the present era is read a half century hence, a
quarter century, or even a decade, that writer is William De Morgan."
'^Boston Transcript.

SOMEHOW GOOD

How two brave women won their way to happiness.
**A book as sound, as sweet, as wholesome, as wise, as any in tbD
range of fiction."— rA* Nation.

IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN

A story of the great love of Blind Jim and his little daugh-
tei, and of the affairs of a successful novelist.

" De Morgan at his very best, and how much better his best is than
the work of any novelist of the past thirty years "— The Independent.

AN AFFAIR OF DISHONOR

A very dramatic novel of Restoration days.
"A marvelous example of Mr. De Morgan's inexhaustible fecundity
of invention. . . . Shines as a romance quite as much as ^Joseph
Vance ' does among realistic novels."— OiiVra^o Record-Herald.

A UKELY STORY

"Begins comfortably enough with a little domestic quarrel in a
studio. . . . The story shifts suddenly, however, to a brilliantly
told tragedy of the Italian Renaissance embodied in a girl's portrait.
. . . The many readers who like Mr. De Morgan will enjoy this ctiarm-
ing fancy greatly."- A^eto York Sun.

A Likely Slory, S-r-SS net ; the others, Si.ys each.

WHEN GHOST MEETS GHOST

The most " De Morganish " of all his stories. The scene
is England in the fifties. 862 pages. $1.60 net.

«*« A thirty-two page illustrated leaflet about Mr. De Morgan, with
complete reviews of his first four books, sent on request.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK